Mirabile (19 page)

Well, she didn’t understand it but she did believe me. She gave my offer thoughtful consideration and then said, “Nah. I’d rather fish with you.”

And that was a compliment of the highest order.

Feeling well loved and very smug, I settled back once more. I had plans not to move for the rest of the day, or at least until it was time for one of Chris’s dinners up at Loch Moose Lodge.

Ilanith settled back too, looking much the same.

It was enough to lean back and appreciate the loch, laugh at the antics of the otters at one end and the odders at the other, and not catch so much as a fry.

Something hovered around us. It had the right amount of legs to be an insect but not one I’d ever seen before so I cocked an eye to watch. I couldn’t tell at first glance if it was native Mirabilan or one of our imports. It made an odd kind of whining noise.

Ilanith was watching it, too. She wanted to look at its genes as much as I did.

The object of our mutual interest lit on my arm. The whine cut off just as suddenly. Afraid to
Page 73

disturb it, I moved my head, not my arm, for a closer look—just as it bit me.

I slapped it flat.

“Mama Jason!”

I’d sure as hell shocked Ilanith all right. “Vacation’s over,” I said. “And you can do a gene-read on a mashed bug just as easily as you can on a live one if you move fast enough. Now, move!”

We did. Rowed like hell for shore, charged up the path to the lodge. Ilanith, being the younger by some, took the lead early on. I could hear her shouting instructions to all and sundry before I reached the first crest. By the time I reached the lodge, half of Elly’s kids stood wide-eyed in the hallway.

“You smashed it?” said Jen. Her eyes were huge. “Really smashed it?”

“Yes,” I said, thrusting out my arm to show her the evidence. “Where’s Ilanith?”

Mouth agape, Jen just pointed up the stairs. When I headed up, she trailed behind.

The rest of them were too astonished to move that fast. I’d obviously scandalized the whole troop. “Elly!” wailed one of the smaller ones, “Elleee!”

In my room, Ilanith had already brought up the computer and linked it to my lab.

My kit was spread out across the bed as if it had been upended and dumped. It probably had, come to think of it.

Scowling ferociously, Ilanith scooped the remains of the bug from my arm none too gently and stuffed a sample into the analyzer.

“You take half,” I said. “Run your own gene-read. We’ll compare notes when you’re done.”

That set her face to warring with itself. Disapproval of my outrageous behavior met the sheer delight of being asked to help out. The battle was still in progress when she vanished from the room with her sample.

Freed from the distraction, I got to business. The first step was the computer’s.

Once I set that going, I took the time to gather my kit back together.

As I packed away the last of my gear, Elly appeared at the doorway, Aklilu on one hip, a fist on the other. Behind her, just visible enough for me to see small child glowers, were the rest of the kids. The faintest of smiles tugged the corner of Elly’s lips. “I’ve had complaints about you,” she said.

Jen said, “She smashed it, Elly! She even showed us!”

Elly laid a reassuring hand on Jen’s shoulder and said, “I hope you’ve got a good explanation, Annie. You’re the one who’s always telling us not to trash the wildlife unless there’s a good reason for it.” Elly Raiser Roget is a small woman but her mother tones could stop a kangaroo rex in mid-charge.

Feeling more than a little defensive, I dropped my eyes to my arm. A small bump had raised. I jabbed a finger at it. “I also tell you not to take stupid chances. I don’t think I slapped it fast enough.”

Elly slid Aklilu down onto the floor beside her, let go of Jen and reached for my arm. “An allergic reaction? Annie, should I phone for Doc Agbabian?”

I shook my head. “A minor allergic reaction. The same as you’d get if the damn thing had bitten you. I don’t need the doc, but it’d be a big help if you’d take a sample of that for me so I can analyze it, too. I can’t reach it left-handed.”

Elly obliged. “If it bit you, it’s not Mirabilan,” she said.

“Right.” Most of the Mirabilan wildlife doesn’t like the way humans taste. At least, the native bloodsuckers don’t. The swarming horrors only like humans for their sweat, and they’re bad enough to give anybody nightmares, which gives you some idea how they got their name. “We need insectivores,” I said aloud.

Elly’d heard that complaint often enough that she ignored it. “So whatever bit you was something we brought with us.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “And you think you know what or
Page 74

you wouldn’t have smashed it.”

“I hope I’m wrong. But I couldn’t take the chance, Elly.”

That satisfied her, but not the kids. The computer’s beep for attention gave me a chance to escape their massed frowns. I pulled over a chair and settled down for a look at the gene-read. It was an import, all right.

I keyed for ships’ records. Jen had shoved up close to scowl at the screen. I scooped her into my lap and said, “Get me the gene library.”

She did. Then she craned her head around and said, “You want insects, right?”

“Right.”

She misspelled “insects” on the first try but made it fine on the second.

“Hold it there,” I said. “Before you set the computer to searching the whole section for a match, we try a guess.” Arms on either side of her, my chin on her shoulder, I keyed in for “mosquito.”

Then we waited.

“This takes a long time, Mama Jason!”

Well, not really—but at that age they’ve got a different time sense. “If I remember right, the computers got some three hundred species to check through,” I said. “See how long it would take you if you had to do it by hand!” The longer it took, the better, as far as I was concerned: I was hoping the search wouldn’t turn-up a match.

From Elly’s deepened frown, I could tell she’d recognized the “mosquito” and was hoping just as hard as I was.

No such luck. The computer beeped a potential match. Jen whooped and dived for the keyboard to call up a display.

I called back the gene-read on the thing I’d smashed and laid the images side by side. “Well, Jen?

What do you say?”

She took her time considering, touching a fingertip first to one image then to the other. At last she leaned back and said, “I think they’re the same, Mama Jason.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m afraid they are.”

Jen bounced off my lap with a second whoop. “We’ve got a match!” She caught up Akilu’s hands. “We’ve got a match!” Within moments, the entire troop was dancing about the room to the same chant.

That was what Ilanith walked in on. Give her credit—it didn’t disappoint her in the slightest. “I take it I don’t have to search insects. Want to compare notes, Mama Jason?” She brought her results up on the screen and made the same careful examination that Jen had between her gene-read and the one from ships’ records.

“It’s a match. That means you had a good idea what it was when you slapped it.

And that means it’s not something we want loose on Mirabile… What’s a mosquito?”

Elly stared at her. “I thought you were reading Thoholte this year. Her Laughing

Gods is downright eloquent on the subject of mosquitoes.”

Even as the match dance weaved around her, Ilanith shuffled her own feet for a very different reason. She didn’t answer for a long moment, and when she did it was: “I was reading up on genetics, Mama Jason. I don’t have time for all this fiction stuff.”

Elly cocked an eye at me over Ilanith’s head. I knew what was wanted and I obliged. “How do you think I recognized the damn thing when it bit me? I’ve read Laughing Cods

. Kiddo, with whole chunks missing from ships’ records, we’ve got to make do with what we’ve got. Maybe we’ve got a complete set of gene-reads for the Earth-authentic insects, maybe not.

Part of a Jason’s job is to know the available sources. Fiction’s sometimes as useful as nonfiction. If I hadn’t read Thoholte, we’d be twiddling our thumbs while the computer spent
Page 75

the night searching for that match.”

Ilanith jumped on that as an excuse to change the subject. “So we’ve got the match… now what?”

“Now, if Elly will lend me the troops, we’re going down to Loch Moose to see how many of those little fiends we can net.”

“Nets,” said Elly. “I know. Chris has cheesecloth in the kitchen—that will do for nets.”

“I’ll go,” Ilanith said.

“You,” I said, catching her before she could make good her escape, “will go read Thoholte. I want you to know exactly what we’re up against.”

Our sweep of the lake was more enthusiastic than efficient, what with a half-dozen kids of all ages flailing about with cheesecloth nets, but every adult staying at the lodge had come along to join the hunt. No point calling in the team from the lab when I had so many willing hands.

I had my doubts that we’d accomplish anything—not because the hunters were amateurs, but because of the scope of the problem. Any Earth import might have been the source of that mosquito. I knew about half of the water lilies were incubating dragonflies. The other half might be the source of the mosquitoes. Or the dragonflies themselves might be laying mosquito eggs these days. For insects, there are just too many possible sources. We’d have to run gene-reads on every

Earth-authentic plant and animal in the forest. By the time we identified the source, chances were the mosquitoes would already have a viable population established.

Having read what I’d read about mosquitoes, the prospect looked downright grim. Aside from their pure nuisance qualities, mosquitoes would be a disease vector. I suppose I should be grateful for small favors that the folks back on Earth hadn’t included disease genes on their

“keeper” list. But we have diseases of our own to worry about and I could have done without a vector. Up to now, we’ve been handling Sanoshan fever with a combination of quarantine and a short-lived vaccine— mosquitoes might change that completely.

So the adults and the little ones all caught bugs—to much crowed delight. Kept Jen busy running their samples up to the lodge. I had an evening’s worth of gene-reading ahead of me and I was not looking forward to it. For the moment, at least, their good time was infectious. Even the odders stopped their playing to watch.

Filippo managed to fall in the loch not just once but twice, to be fished out each time by his sister Darice. (Luckily, the whole troop swims like odders, but some days I don’t know how Elly stands it—just watching them is hair-raising.) Morien insisted on showing each of her catches to everyone—she seemed to be specializing in dragonflies. Even Aklilu caught bugs, with more than a little assistance from Elly, I

suspect.

We were beginning to lose the light, though. Elly rowed in close. “Look, Mama Jason!” said Aklilu. “Look bug!”

I looked bug. “Good catch,” I told him. “I’ve never seen one like that before.”

His eyes got big. “Oh,” he said, clutching his net and staring at his bug, “Dragon’s Tooth.”

No sense arguing definitions with Aklilu, so I didn’t. Elly grinned at me and said, “Time to head in—on a note of triumph.” She gave a sharp whistle and heads turned all around. “Head for shore,” she shouted. There was some mutinous grumbling but not much. What Elly says goes.

We all rowed for shore.

The fun was over; the rest of the evening would be pure and simple grub work.

That it really was simple work meant I had Jen’s extra hands to help me run samples, though, at least until she got bored with the repetitiveness of the job.

As it turned out, the first tap on my shoulder wasn’t Jen’s. It was Leo’s and I got a real nice set of kisses as a follow-up… I sighed, saved everything and switched the computer off. “Break for dinner.”

“So much for your vacation,” said Leo. “I seem to have missed all the excitement. Between the door and here, I have heard that Mama Jason smashed a bug—an Earth-authentic bug, no less, that Aklilu caught a Dragon’s Tooth, that Mama Jason smashed a bug, that the entire population of the lodge played jason this afternoon, that Annie Jason Masmajean—defender of the kangaroo rex—

smashed a bug

! But I also see Elly is as close to a worried frown as I’ve ever known her to be, which means you must have had a very good reason for smashing the bug. Why don’t you tell me all about it over dinner?”

If there’s one thing Leonov Bellmaker Denness knows, it’s the way to a woman’s heart: good food, a sympathetic ear and a lot of necking. Not necessarily in that order. After the lot of necking, we went downstairs to the dining room, ordered Chris’s special of the day, which was a good spicy hopfish bouillabaisse, and I told him all about it.

I was instantly sorry I’d done it—all those deep-etched laugh lines in his face twisted away as if they’d never been there and his normally brown skin took on an undercast of green that was distinctly uncomplimentary. “Sorry,” I said and took his hand in mine.

He shook his head. “I had kin on the

Sanoshan

. They were survivors. I’ve seen their accounts of the last years aboard, when they weren’t sure there’d be enough hands to make a landing—or if they dared even make a landing for fear of killing off the rest of the colonists. The thought of an insect vector for Sanoshan fever scares me silly…”

“No,” I said. “It had better scare you rational, if we want to do something about it. I’ve already warned Main Medical, but I think you’d better put in a word, too.

Chances are a survivor can really spur them into action.”

Made me think how lucky I really was to have Leo. Eight hundred people died in the Sanoshan epidemic, and there was nothing the other ships could do to help without infecting their own populations.

He nodded. “Tomorrow morning I break the bell out of its cast. Assuming it came out right, I thought I’d ask you to come along to RightHere and help me deliver it. Bell or no bell, I’ll head for RightHere tomorrow and stop by Medical. If we want the entire population vaccinated, it’ll take some time for them to gear up production…”