Mirabile (20 page)

“Leo, I’m selfish as all hell. I want Elly and the kids vaccinated now

—and you, too.”

“I’m an immune, Annie. If you doubt me, you can check a cell sample right now.

How about you?”

I hadn’t even thought of it.

Leo read my expression and said, “I thought not—and you’re the one with the mosquito bite.

You will get your vaccination updated.” The laugh lines came back into his face. “Can’t have you setting a bad example for Elly’s kids!”

I hate vaccinations but he was right. I’d do it. If I worked hard, I might even be able to do it with some sort of grace. I tried to wipe the scowl off my face but I obviously didn’t succeed because Leo laughed.

“I don’t care how grudgingly you do it, Annie, as long as you do it.”

At that point, Susan came out of nowhere, threw her arms around Leo’s shoulders and said,
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“What’s Mama Jason doing now, Noisy—grudgingly or otherwise?”

“Getting vaccinated for Sanoshan fever,” he told her. “What about you? When was the last time you were vaccinated for it?”

“Me? Two years ago.” Susan threw her arms around me. “Elly’s a stickler for keeping up on vaccinations.”

I hugged her back hard out of sheer relief. Should have known Elly would take care of something like that. I’d double-check for safety’s sake, but I felt better already. “Next question,”

I began.

Susan pushed back and grinned. “Mike found the lab computer searching through mosquito gene-reads. When it signaled a match, he checked the origin of the request.

We drew straws over who got to come up to Loch Moose to help you out. I cheated. Now you’re asking if I’ve been vaccinated for Sanoshan fever… I’ll go tell Mike we guessed right.”

I stopped her. “Tell Mike I want everybody on the team revaccinated by the end of the week.”

“Done,” she said and vanished as quickly as she’d come. When she reappeared, she pulled up a chair and settled at our table. Chris put a bowl in front of her, gave her a hug and a spoon and said, “Eat up. It’s good for the ecology!”

Between mouthfuls, Susan asked questions. Being that age makes them impatient for answers. I did my best, with Leo’s help, but when she got to “Where are they coming from?” I had no answer.

“From Leo’s pansies, for all I know.” That was the hell of it. They could be coming from anything.

Susan, temporarily incapacitated by a mouthful of bouillabaisse, shook her head violently. Leo said, “Not from my pansies. I can vouch for every one of them.”

Susan swallowed hastily. “S’truth, Mama Jason. I showed Noisy how to read for secondary and tertiary helices so he could check them. I double-checked the first batch for him, but he was doing fine so the rest I let him handle.”

I stared at Leo. It must have been the wrong kind of stare because he shifted in his seat and looked apologetic and said, “You’re always complaining about being shorthanded, Annie. Since I was the one who wanted the pansies in the first place, it’s only fair I look after them myself.”

He let it hang a minute, then he added, “Ilanith double-checked them, in case I missed anything.”

There was another pause. My fault. I was still too surprised to say anything. Leo and Susan looked at each other. Then Leo said, “I’m not about to apologize for stepping on your turf, Annie. It was fun finding out what’s hiding in my patch of pansies.”

I threw up my hands. “Fun? I don’t need an apology—I’m pleased as all hell.

What is hiding in your patch of pansies?”

So it was back to the computer, this time to link up to Leo’s across the loch, for the list. Most of it was pansy related, which was a relief. The dog-tooth violets seemed like a nice idea, as did the spring beauties. Some insects, but not many, and those in the offing were harmless, except for the one that promised cutworms somewhere down the line. One more demonstration of how badly we need insectivores. I tapped it on the screen.

“Susan told me to pull and burn that one,” Leo said.

That would have been my decision, too, and I told him so. “Our rice crop’s in enough trouble from the hopfish without adding cutworms to the stew. And I doubt even Chris could come up with a recipe that made cutworms appetizing.”

“Just don’t let her hear you disparage her talents,” Leo said with a grin.

I looked at the list again. “We could do with some of your butterflies. Blue butterfly, okay, but pull the cabbage butterfly—”

“Pulled and burned.”

This time I turned my chair to have a good look at him. “You’re way ahead of me on this, aren’t you?”

He spread his hands. “I’m bored with the bellmaking and I’m too old to go back to opening new territory, but this is a kind of scouting, too. Why do you think I hang around with you all the time?”

I gave him the hairy eyeball I’d learned from Susan in her younger days and said, “And here I thought it was my good looks!”

“It is,” he said. He tapped the screen. “This is gravy. The least I can do is keep tabs on my pansy patch. And, before you ask, we tagged every last one of them.

You can pull or coddle the rest at your leisure.”

“My leisure… Now that would be a lovely thought. You have saved me one helluva lot of trouble. And, if you’re serious about this ‘fun’ of yours, why don’t you give us a hand with the insects we caught this afternoon?”

I haven’t seen a human being light up like that since I told Susan she could help with the gene-reads. Crinkles of the best kind all over that face and a flash of grin like… well, that must be what fireflies were like.

The thought made me reconsider the list. “Still no fireflies.” I keep hoping.

“Maybe your fireflies will turn up in this afternoon’s catch. Give me a bunch of samples and I’ll start looking.” He held out those beautiful huge hands of his… and I filled them with jars and sent him off to grub through genes with the rest of us.

Shortly after that Ilanith popped in with her fingers stuck into Elly’s hardback copy of Laughing Gods in no less than three places. “This is terrific, Mama Jason!

Listen to this,” she said and read me five pages of Thoholte’s epic battle with the mosquitoes.

Then she added, “No wonder you smashed it! Did she write anything else?”

“Lots,” I told her, “check the library index,” and shooed her out before she could read me the next five pages she’d fingermarked. Makes me wonder what goes through kids’ minds sometimes. Would I make her read a book I didn’t like?

Susan, having finished her dinner, stuck her head in the door. “Where’s the mosquito you mashed, Mama Jason? I want to try something.”

I pulled out the sample for her. “What something?”

“I’ve been thinking. If it’s possible to read the helices to find out what’s coming next, shouldn’t it be possible to backtrack to see where it came from

?”

“Damned if I know,” I said. “I don’t think anybody’s ever tried it. You’ll have to do it manually—computer’s not set up for that—but if it works I’ll see you get a bonus week off this year.”

“Hah! Like your vacation, I bet.” She didn’t wait for an answer. Not that she had to—most likely she was right.

I growled something about my lost vacation to the empty doorway. It wasn’t Elly I meant to growl at, but Elly’s sudden appearance made it seem just that.

“No arguments,” Elly said. She jabbed a finger at me and said, “And this one, Suvendi.”

Before I could so much as acknowledge Suvendi Doc Agbabian, he had my sleeve shoved up and was shooting me full of vaccine. I didn’t argue.

Except for a sighting of the Loch Moose monster, the rest of the evening was uneventful.

Early next morning just about everybody at the lodge rowed across the loch to Leo’s place to watch him break the bell from its cast. Fancy piece of casting—covered top to lip with relief work. When he’d shined it up a bit, Susan shouted, “Odders! Look, it’s all over
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odders!” That was something of an exaggeration—there were just as many pansies as there were odders—but it was one helluva bell.

Leo strung the clapper, then we tossed a rope over a rafter, hefted the thing up and gave it a try.

The bell rang out loud and sweet—a deep, deep bong that must have startled every animal for miles around. We tied the rope off temporarily and retreated outside, holding our ears, while each kid took a turn ringing it. After the first two rings, the odders took to bellowing in response, which seemed about right.

Even Aklilu got it to sound, though Jen told us later he’d had to swing from the pull to do it.

It was two hours before we got it packed into my hover and headed for RightHere. From Loch Moose to RightHere it’s all upriver, which is nice smooth hovering, and there are plenty of places to stay along the way. We made a four-day trip of it.

Must have signed a dozen guest books along the way—most of them for folks we didn’t actually stay with, which was cheating a bit—but how often does a bell that size go by? Everybody wanted a peek at it and a remembrance of the occasion. For once, nobody was disappointed when Leo signed himself “Leo

Bell-maker

Denness” instead of “Leo Opener Denness.”

Except maybe Leo. He had said he was getting tired of bellmaking.

The second night there was a General Delivery call out for me from Susan at Loch Moose. It was the one I was waiting for but hadn’t been expecting, if you follow that… She didn’t even say hello, just started out with, “It works, Mama Jason! I backtracked it! And a friend of Elly’s volunteered to hack it into the computer so next time it won’t take forever to do one.”

Leo gave me a sidelong glance and said, “I take it she means she found out where the mosquito came from?”

“And that somebody’s writing a program that will let us backtrack fast next time,”

I said, finishing the translation. “So where did the mosquito come from?” I asked Susan.

“One of Chris’s tomato plants. We’re doing gene-reads on the whole bed now.

So far only the one but…”

I sighed and finished for her, “But we’ll have to check every tomato plant on Mirabile, for safety’s sake. What did you do with the offender?”

“That’s the second thing I called about. Chris wants to hold a ceremonial burning. Any reason why not? It’s her tomato plant.”

“Fair is fair,” I told her. “But I can think of a major reason why not: you know how people get carried away. I don’t want every tomato plant on Mirabile roasted.

Check the whole bed first, do the same for any other beds in the area, then burn the offenders. Tell Chris to make sure the spinners and gossips see her selecting specific plants for the fire.”

She’d have done it then and there, but I held up a finger and said, “And remind her she’s Chris Jason

Maryanska in a case like this. She should also cook up one of those stuffed tomato things for anybody who comes for the show. That’d help.

They taste something that good, they’ll be much less likely to burn the inoffensive plants.”

“Right. Chris’ll love that, Mama Jason. We’ll get on it first thing in the morning.”

She laughed suddenly. “You know what Chris calls that recipe?”

I shook my head.

“‘Tomato

Surprise.

’”

Righthere is the closest thing on Mirabile to a city in the Earth-authentic style. It has paved roads, stone buildings, and it’s home to ships’ library. Kind of pretty from a distance, since it sits on an estuary and looks out over Greenglass Sea. A little too constricted for my taste, I think. There’s talk of putting in street lights, which means the cheerups will probably move out, and I like to listen to the cheerups carol to each other all night.

Leo dropped me off on a corner and headed on to Main Medical. First things first, he said. He had samples of everything, plus a ten-pound printout of the disease-carrying history of mosquitoes. If that wasn’t enough to reinforce our suggestion that medical gear up to revaccinate everybody on Mirabile for Sanoshan fever, he’d hit them with the horror stories his family had passed down three generations, which would most certainly do it.

I went straight to Jason’s Hall to see if the past four days had brought them any more luck establishing insectivores on Mirabile than the past three generations had.

Sabah Jason Al-Sumidaie met me just inside the door with: “No, Annie, we haven’t had a bit of luck with songbirds here, either.”

“I knew it was too much to ask.”

So we sat down to compare notes and bitches over tea. Sabah clicked his tongue over my mosquito bite and we both drank a hearty curse to those long-dead geneticists back on Earth who’d caused us this problem.

They’d tried a dozen new kinds of songbird since I’d last checked more than the names and the viability. Not one of them had survived. Looking over their records, I saw the same sort of pattern I’d been seeing in my environmental conditions—

Mirabile’s native life was so hostile to songbirds that even Dragon’s Teeth didn’t survive to breed a second generation, not in either EC.

When I said as much out loud, Sabah said, “M-hm. Either the eggs get eaten or the adults do. I think we’ll have to put someone on insectivores full-time. I don’t see any other way to solve the problem.”

I snorted. “Full time.”

“You know what I mean, Annie. Full-time except for emergencies.”

“We also need somebody full-time on Mirabilan wildlife. That might give us a handle of what birds we should be choosing.”

“If I get you the salaries, can you get me the bodies? I mean it, Annie, full-time as much as practical.”

Makes me nosy when Sabah talks like that. “If you’ve got the salaries, why haven’t you got the bodies?”

Sabah twinkled at me. “We’re civilized here in RightHere. It’s Mama Jason and her team of Dragon’s Tooth hunters that attract the youngsters.”

“Get stuffed,” I told him, with a smile. I’ve heard some stories in my time but that

…

“I’m serious, Annie. I could name you three kids in town that would kill to work with you. But not here and not with us. It’s a matter of perception.”

“Send ’em to me. I’ll read ’em the riot act about a proper apprenticeship—with you.”