Mirabile (21 page)

Sabah put down his glass of tea. “You know, that might just work.”

“If it doesn’t, at least wind up with extra hands,” I said. “And now that we’ve I

solved that problem, let’s see if we can do something about the damned insectivores.”

We didn’t solve that one, of course. Not likely we’d solve in one afternoon what hadn’t been solved in the three generations we’d been on Mirabile. But we did know a lot of things that wouldn’t work by the time we were done.

When we got tired of beating our heads against that particular wall, I checked my mail. Susan had sent along a preliminary program for backtracking the source of a Dragon’s Tooth with the note: “Marian says it’s not ‘elegant’ but it ought to hold us while she whips up a better one.”

“‘Elegant’?” said Sabah.

“Hacker-talk,” I explained. “Means, as far as I can tell, the program’s not as efficient as it might be. Same use of ‘elegant’ as in mathematics.”

There was a gosh-wow from Chris, too. Then I cast about a bit and found the expected one from Leo. It read: “Scared the daylights out of medical. I’ll be at the cathedral.” It ended with a whole slew of bare-hug graphics. When I turned back to Sabah, he was grinning like nobody’s business.

“You didn’t tell me you had a new beau, Annie,” he said in mock accusation.

“You didn’t ask,” I countered. Knowing what would come next, I held up both hands to fend him off. “I’ve been officially proposed to, and I mean to accept as soon as I can think of an appropriate courting gift. That last is not as easy as it sounds.

He gave me a kangaroo rex.”

Sabah’s eyes went wide. “I’m impressed. That alone makes it sound like a match.

Who is this wonder?”

“His name’s Leonov Bellmaker Denness—used to be Leonov Opener D—”

Sabah raised hands to cut me off. “I know Leo, Annie. He’s making the bell for our cathedral.”

His raised hands landed on my shoulders. “Good combination, you and Leo! And I don’t mean just genetically.”

“Good. Then maybe you can show me where this ‘cathedral’ thing is. He’s there delivering your bell now.”

With a shout that he was off for the rest of the day, Sabah hustled me to the door.

“‘Cathedral’ is guild tongue for a large and very ornate stone building used for ritual purposes,”

he explained, as he led the way. (Only a member of a guild uses the phrase ‘guild tongue’ without specifying what guild. I wasn’t about to ask. Tends to set them to proselytizing about how much fun you’d have if you joined the Nippon

Guild or the Texas Guild or whatever.) “How long has it been since you’ve been to RightHere?”

“Years, at least.”

“Hm, and you don’t pay much attention to anything other than Dragon’s Teeth.”

“Except the kids and Leo,” I corrected.

“Then you’re in for a surprise.”

Well, I have to admit—Sabah was right on that count. I’ve never seen a building that big in my life, except in pictures in ships’ records. You could have stuck the entire population of RightHere inside it with room to spare.

And “ornate” didn’t begin to describe it. More than half the damn thing was a solid mass of vaults and spires and carvings. The rest was still rough shaped—blocks holding up the portico where (I assumed) there’d soon be more figures to match those on the other side of the entrance.

I was so busy gawking that Sabah startled me when he grabbed my arm. “Hunh?”

I said.

“One thing, Annie. When the guild finds out who you are, they’re gonna hit you up for bats.

They already did me—I told them we didn’t have the time for frivolities—but that doesn’t stop them from persisting. So feel free to say no.”

“Bats,” I said, not taking my eyes off the cathedral. “Say no. Gotcha.” And I went for a closer look.

The entire history of Mirabile was carved into the walls of the cathedral. Here was the takeoff
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from Earth (though some of those plants were Mirabilan, not Earth-authentic) to the generations in journey (including a very authentic and gruesome portrayal of Sanoshan fever) to the landing and the opening. I was fascinated as all hell to find a much younger Leo among the openers and

Granddaddy Jason locked in ferocious battle with a double helix. Aside from that first panel, the artist had done a damn realistic job.

“Check the caryatids,” said Leo, as he came down the wide staircase from the center doors. I bussed him instead, then I asked him, “What the hell’s a caryatid?”

He pointed to the figures holding up the roof. Took me a minute to place their faces as those of the ships’ captains. They were right, even down to the desperation on the face of that last captain of the Sanoshan. Tiny figures at the feet of each gave further details of shipboard life under each particular captaincy.

“Now look up,” Leo said—and pointed.

I craned my neck and stepped back. Glaring down at me, mouths gaping, was the damnedest collection of Dragon’s Teeth ever assembled in the history of Mirabile. I was standing, I found, directly under a kangaroo rex—not a face you’d forget if you’d seen it live the way I had. The artist had captured it so well that it seemed poised to leap on its prey.

I shifted position.

From the side, I could see every last bit of musculature under the hide of the damn thing. And, yes, it was set to spring on its prey. Every inch of it just about vibrated, right down to the shadow of stripes across its haunches.

I let out a whistle of pure admiration.

Leo said, “You got it right, Bethany. See if you didn’t.”

Which reminded me Leo was there, not that I ever really forget. I turned to find him grinning and pushing a pixie in my direction. “Bethany, meet Annie Jason Masmajean. Annie, this is Bethany Carver Barandemaje.”

She was as tiny as Leo is big, but the resemblance was unmistakable. “One of your kids, yes?” I stuck out a hand and got a tiny but very wiry and very callused hand in return.

“One of my three favorites,” Leo said. He was still grinning shamelessly.

“Good thing you’ve only got three,” Bethany told him, “or we’d be forced to take matters in hand.”

“And I’d find myself sandblasted into the shape of a chimera and spending the rest of my life pouring water down on the world.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Why put Dragon’s Teeth—even one based on Leo—on a cathedral?”

“Oh,” she said, “it’s traditional. Only on earth they called them gargoyles. I thought a Mirabilan cathedral ought to have Mirabilan gargoyles. It’s part of the drainage system. After a rain, they spout water from their mouths. Come on up and have a closer look before we lose all the light.”

The closer look was even more impressive. I laid my hand on the kangaroo rex’s flank and discovered that I could feel every one of those bunched muscles. It was almost disturbing that the only difference between Bethany’s kangaroo rex and the live ones I’d touched was that there was a chill to the stone one. “I’d hate to mess with that,” I said, which set both Leo and Bethany off in chuckles.

Still laughing, they dragged me up entirely too many flights of stairs to the belfry.

“Belfry” is another guild term, I take it—it means the spire they were to hang Leo’s bell in. If I’d thought the view from RightHere was beautiful, the view from the belfry was a stunner. The entire town and harbor was spread out below us. As cold as the prospect might be (the windows
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weren’t glassed in), I promised myself I’d stop back in the winter to see what RightHere looked like under a mantle of snow.

Now we were losing the light, so Bethany lit a torch—a real torch, straight out of historical dramas, which gives you some idea how seriously the guild takes its play—and led us back to the stairwell.

I said to Leo, “D’you suppose she felt obligated to do all this carving with a hammer and chisel?”

He snorted with laughter. “That torch is gasoline fed, Annie, burns a lot cleaner than wood. And she uses state-of-the-art to do her carving. No way she could have done so much in so short a time without it.”

We followed Bethany all the way back to her house. Turned out Leo had arranged for us to stay there as long as we were in town. I suspect this is Leo’s way of introducing me to all his kids and grandkids. Who am I to object? I was beginning to like Leo’s genes as much as I like Leo. I hadn’t actually looked at them, mind you, but the results seemed to be consistently good, even to the grandkids.

Bethany had two bouncing around the household, which meant I had to tell about the kangaroo rex all over again. Leo made eyebrows at me all through the telling.

When I finished, Arkady asked, “What did you give him for a courting present, Annie?”

“Yeah!” demanded Vassily, “What did you give him?”

“Nothing yet. I don’t know what to give him for a courting present. Maybe you two have some ideas?”

“Oh, yes!”

I hushed them instantly. “Not in front of Leo! I want to surprise him! We’ll talk about it when he isn’t around.”

So Bethany hustled them off to bed amid conspiratorial whispers and giggles and promises of tomorrow.

“Hope they come up with a good idea,” Leo said with a grin.

“Me too.” I grinned back. “Oh, well. Hold that thought, Leo. I still have work to do tonight.”

So Leo wound up looking over my shoulder while I went through the hard copy on birds one more time.

Not that it did me any good. Staring at genes wasn’t going to make them viable. If we knew what was killing the birds off we might be able to twitch the genes around a little. For all I knew, the Earth-authentic birds were eating something Mirabilan and dropping dead on the spot. Damnify knew what—maybe the swarming horrors. I

dropped the hard copy in a heap on the table and only then realized that Leo had wandered off.

“Deserter,” I said.

“You’ve been talking about birds for months now,” Leo said, looking up from the computer.

“The only birds I’ve seen are ducks and quail and Cornish fowl. I want to see the kind you’re interested in.”

“Oh. Let me. I know where they’re hidden in ships’ records.” I pulled up a chair and found some birds for Leo—not gene-reads but photos of the animals themselves. “There,” I said. “That’s a pretty characteristic bird.”

I turned to find him frowning at the screen. “It’s different from what you’re used to, but I wouldn’t think it deserves a scowl.”

“Do ships’ records include any photos of them in motion, Annie?”

When Leo asks a question in that tone, he’s got a damn good reason for asking.

So I tapped a little deeper and found him some motion pictures of various birds. He watched the birds, I watched him. The frown deepened the longer he watched.

At last he said, “Find me a motion picture of each of the birds you’ve tried to establish on
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Mirabile.”

So I went down the list, both Sabah’s and mine. It took about an hour to satisfy him, though toward the end less than a minute of film was sufficient before he called for the next one. “That’s it,” I said, turning off the computer. “That’s the lot.”

The frown wrinkled into pure sadness. “Shall I tell you why you couldn’t get any of those established on Mirabile, Annie?”

“If you don’t voluntarily, I’ll sic your grandchildren on you!”

That brought a smile back to his face. He raised both hands and said, “I volunteer. Annie, all those birds move just like flurts.” Then he waited.

I knew he was waiting for me to think about it, so I did. He was right. The Mirabilan flurt doesn’t have feathers and it doesn’t fly but it does move with the same bounce and hop as the birds I’d showed him. And it spent much of its time in trees. Its feet were built for climbing, not so well for walking.

Then I realized what Leo was getting at. “The whompems are eating them!”

“I’d bet money on it,” Leo said. “The whompems eat your birds thinking they’re flurts.

Obviously, your birds don’t poison the whompems either.”

“We’ve spent years feeding the whompems. Hell.”

“Sorry, Annie.”

“Good grief, Leo, don’t be sorry. We could have spent years more feeding the whompems.

Now we have to think of something else.”

I brought the computer up once more to leave a note for Sabah telling him what we’d been doing wrong (and giving Leo full credit). Then I dragged Leo off to bed to thank him properly.

Nothing quite like a good night’s romp to clear the mind. If we’d been going at the problem wrong, then we needed to come at it from another angle. The very first thing I did (after breakfast) was to set Leo the task of looking through the file for any bird that wouldn’t attract the predatory attention of a whompem. The Cornish fowl hadn’t been eaten by whompems, so I had some hope for the project—and Leo seemed enthusiastic about helping out.

Then I hunted up Bethany’s kids. “Okay,” I said, “you promised me a suggestion for Leo’s courting gift.”

“Right,” said Vassily. He gave a glance at Arkady that made me instantly suspect mischief, then the two of them glanced around furtively—checking, it seemed, where their dad had gotten to.

Dad was out of earshot. Still, Vassily beckoned me closer.

By now I was curious as all hell to find out what the two of them were up to. I bent down and turned an ear close.

“Bats!” Vassily whispered. The whisper was loud enough to bring a vigorous nod of agreement from Arkady.

Bats. Where had I heard about bats, and just recently too? Ah, from Sabah. I was not to let the guild hassle me for bats.

“Bats,” I said aloud. “That’s it? Last night you had ‘lots’ of suggestions.”

Arkady drew himself up and said, “Bats is best.”

“And you think Leo would like this bats thing?” I’d spoken in a normal tone of voice. The two of them hastily shushed me, drawing a curious look from dad.

“Oh, yes,” came the answer, still whispered. “Leo would like you-know-whats best of all.”

“All right,” I whispered back. “I’ll look into it and see if I agree with you. Thanks for the suggestion.”

I left the two of them hugging each other in what looked to me like triumph and headed out for another look at the cathedral. That day I could have found it from the noise alone or from the cloud of rock dust Bethany’s carving raised.