Mirabile (25 page)

“Sure, Annie. You’ll want to see the plants anyhow. Maybe you can give us some suggestions about how to get rid of the damn things.”

“Or about how to get along with them.”

“You haven’t seen them yet. They can’t be Mirabilan and if you don’t need them for anything, I need them gone.”

Cows with encrypted plant genes didn’t sound likely to me, but I wasn’t about to bet on it after some of the Dragon’s Teeth I’ve been chewed by. Personally, though, I didn’t care if the damn things had fangs eight feet long—all I needed was a change from dandelions.

I palmed the next hundred dandelion gene-reads off on Mike and went outside to hunt up Leo.

Found him watching Mabob stalk a whompem. I kept my mouth shut and watched as well, a little surprised that Leo didn’t intervene—whompems run about a foot long, with a full set of predator’s teeth and claws. This one was no exception.

The other thing that surprised me was that Mabob was actually keeping its mouth shut, something I didn’t think it was capable of doing for more than three seconds at a time. Despite its size, that green-stripe camouflage really worked. When Mabob froze, it vanished into the background as if it had never been there.

It had worked its way between the whompem and the edge of the forest. Took me some hard looking to spot it. Then it started to inch toward the whompem. Those huge clawed feet were absolutely silent.

Maybe thought it was absolutely silent, but something tipped off the whompem I

and it ran like hell. Like hell wasn’t nearly good enough. Mabob had long legs and a flat-out gallop I wouldn’t have believed unless I’d seen it.

Mabob chased the whompem the length of the street and overtook it in front of Mike and Selima’s house, where it rolled its talons into a club and swung at the whompem’s head. Even at that distance, I could hear bone crack. The whompem went flying. Mabob dashed after it, and before the whompem hit the ground, Mabob had sunk a footful of talons into its spine.

Mabob let go with a triumphant gronk

! (Been nighttime, it would’ve waked the entire town.) Then it picked up the whompem in its beak and trotted back to us. It laid the dead whompem at Leo’s feet and gronked again.

“For me?” said Leo.

Mabob nudged the carcass closer to Leo with its foot. Leo stooped and, after checking to make sure it really was dead, picked the carcass up. Mabob rattled its scales in pleasure.

“What do I do now?” Leo asked me, out of the side of his mouth.

“Same as with a cat, I guess. Tell it it’s a mighty hunter. Thank it. Then say you’re not hungry right now and give it back.”

So that’s what he did. Mabob took it in good spirit, rattling like a dozen maracas all through the compliments Leo paid it and rattling even harder when Leo rubbed it affectionately where the spiky fur was soft, making it still spikier.

Mabob didn’t seem put out when Leo returned the gift, which was just as well. It clamped a foot on the carcass and began to rip chunks off with its beak and swallow them, bones and all.

“Good thing it thinks you’re its mother,” I said to Leo.

“That’s the first time he’s ever done that,” said Leo, putting just enough emphasis on the “he” to catch my attention.

“I’ll call it a he if it makes you happy, Leo. But I don’t know it’s a he and neither do you. And I can’t tell from the gene-read unless you bring me enough other samples that they include one of the opposite sex. If, that is, this is one of Mirabile’s two-sexed types and not something else altogether.”

“It’d simplify your syntax.”

“‘He’ it is, then. At least until we find out different. And you’d better get him out of Selima’s snap peas unless you want Selima to remove his head.”

Mabob isn’t too particular about what he eats. He’ll try just about anything, animal or vegetable, and he thinks most of it is perfectly good. The one time he’d refused to try something Leo offered him from the table, I got curious enough to do a little testing. Turned out that particular Earth import would have made him sick—that’s pretty efficient hard wiring.

Leo had managed to hustle him out of Mike and Selima’s garden. No real problem. I’d already learned that Mabob would do just about anything Leo asked him to. Meanwhile, I got around to remembering what I’d wanted to talk to Leo about in the first place.

“I’m headed up to Lalique’s,” I said. “She’s got a problem plant. She says it’s my bailiwick, but it could be yours. Want to come along?”

“That’s Haffenhaff Island, right? I was just about to head up there myself—”

“Perfect.”

“I was planning to take Mabob along.”

“So you get me instead.”

He smiled and spread his arms. Anything for an excuse to neck, I always say.

(And we always do.) Mabob thought we were fascinating and rattled his scales furiously while he stretched his neck to try to peer between us. To my relief, he didn’t gronk once.

When we broke the clinch, Leo said, “How about both?”

“Hunh?”

“I want you to meet Nikolai and I want Nikolai to meet you and Mabob.”

Nikolai’s the third of Leo’s kids, the only one I hadn’t met yet. Takes after Leo, which is why he hadn’t even made it to our wedding—he’d been off opening new territory at the time. If Leo wanted him to meet Mabob, too, who was I to argue?

“The things I do for love,” I said. “What are chances you can keep Mabob from gronking the entire trip? I hear one of those trumpet blasts in a closed hover and I’m likely to lose what
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hearing I have left.”

“We’ll open the windows. If we’re lucky, he’ll gronk at the scenery.” He turned to Mabob.

“Want to go for a ride, Mabob?”

The answer was obviously “yes,” and there went the rest of my hearing. Damn Thingamabob didn’t gronk at the scenery—he gronked at Leo, and the entire hover rang with the sound. On the second gronk, I grounded the hover in the nearest clearing. “Hush!” I said to Mabob. “That’s enough! Out!”

Mabob rattled his scales engagingly, but I wasn’t having any. No point doing this if it wasn’t a break from the damn dandelions. “Leo, open the door and shove him out.”

“We can’t just leave him here, Annie!” He sounded a lot like kid defending pet, which I suppose he was.

“I’m not. I’m just putting him out for gronking in a closed space. Do it.”

He did it grudgingly but he did it. I twiddled my thumbs and waited until Mabob shut up and started to peer wistfully through the window. Then I had Leo let him back in—anxious but subdued.

It was some twenty minutes before he relaxed enough to give us another air-horn squawk, at which point I grounded the hover on the spot and threw him out all over again. This time he shut up a lot faster.

By the third time, he shut up the minute he was out of the hover. Leo raised an eyebrow at me.

“I’m taking a leaf from Elly’s book,” I said. I’d once seen her use a similar ploy for misbehavior.

“He’s quiet. Let him back in.”

After that, the rest of the ride was quiet, if you don’t count the maracas as noise.

Compared to the gronks, I didn’t. Five minutes later we came to the Omigolly, turned the hover downriver and there was Haffenhaff.

Haffenhaff’s a good-sized island smack-dab in the middle of the Omigolly River.

Granddaddy Jason picked it as the right place to start raising a herd of Guernseys because, he figured, it was big enough to support the size herd he had planned, but small enough we could police the EC pretty well. Had the added virtue there wasn’t much place for the herd to wander off to. Sooner or later, they’d hit the Omigolly and that’d stop ’em wandering further. He was right: in all my years, I’d never seen the Omigolly low enough to walk across.

From the upstream end, the island looked barren. Scarcely enough vegetation to make an environmental run-up seem worth the trouble—mostly shale and prickles.

The prickles were interesting though, being an epiphyte with the damndest set of equipment for clinging to bare rock you ever saw.

The downstream end was already lush and green, with a spring overlay of reds and yellows.

Granddaddy Jason told me once that his mother had been tickled to death that first spring to find that, “just like Earth, Mirabile thought of flowers too!”

A lot of the firstfolk seemed to have felt the same relief. Damnify I know why.

They couldn’t have had much experience with flowers after so many generations shipboard.

As far as I was concerned, I could have done without—at least without the dandelions. But it was hardly fair to hold the dandelions against Mirabilan evolution.

Couldn’t even hold them against Gaian evolution. I could—and did—hold them against a bunch of long-dead genetic engineers.

Leo’d been giving the island the same once-over I had. “Now I see why it got dubbed ‘half and half,’” he said, grinning at me. Then he pointed. “That’s where we’re going, Mabob.”

Catching Leo’s excitement, Mabob rattled his scales. He looked like he was working up to
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another gronk.

“Don’t you dare, Mabob,” I said. “Hush!”

He didn’t gronk. I was impressed. Telling him three times seemed to have been enough.

“How about that,” Leo said. “It worked.”

“He’s brighter than he looks. Question is, will he remember when the time comes to head home?”

“We’ll see,” said Leo, scratching Mabob around the eyes.

Would be interesting to know. That Mabob took no for an answer made him a lot brighter than I’d originally thought— especially that he took the ‘no’ from me rather than from Leo, who’d raised him from an egg. He surely didn’t think of me as his raiser. He’d only known me for a few weeks, since Leo’d brought him home half-grown, but maybe he’d lumped me in with official adult, worth learning survival techniques from.

I grounded the hover next to the main house, looked first, then stepped onto the ground.

“Watch out for cow pies,” I said to Leo. “Lalique doesn’t usually let the Guernseys into this area, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been here.”

Cow pies—the bane of my life for five years. Nothing native to Mirabile would touch the things, so they’d just piled up and up and up. For a while it’d looked as if we wouldn’t be able to keep the cows. I got stubborn and dug through ships’ files until I found a truly obscure reference.

Turned out they’d had the same trouble with cows on some island on Earth until they’d imported a particular kind of dung beetle.

Three months later, I’d matched the reference to the right beetle in the ships’ cell stores. Three months after that, a lot of beetles were eating themselves into oblivion and I got treated to my first slice of rare roast beef. Now that was an experience I’d like to repeat sometime!

I was about to try to describe the indescribable to Leo when Lalique came waving and hollering up. Mabob went running to greet her. Leo took off after Mabob, bellowing as he ran, “Don’t shoot, Lalique! He’s friendly!”

Mabob stopped, honked happily at Leo, waited for him to catch up. Then the two of them went to meet her together. By the time I ambled along, Mabob had already won Lalique’s laughing approval. She greeted me with, “You’re right, Annie. He’s not that much funnier than a cow.

And he’s a damn sight more responsive. Cows don’t pay you much attention.”

I grinned at Leo. “His raiser taught him some social graces. Not many, but more than the average Guernsey.”

Usually I get met by half a dozen kids, plus the rest of the cowboys. Today there was no sign of Lalique’s brood. I looked around, wondering at the silence. “Where is everybody?”

“Keeping an eye on the last few births. I got ‘time off’ because I was up all last night. I got a few hours sleep waiting for you.”

I snorted. “Your ‘time off’ sounds a lot like mine. Let’s get to work then.”

“Do you want to see the gene-reads first or the Dragon’s Tooth?”

I’d have opted for the gene-reads first, if only because Lalique could get a bit more sleep while I worked on them, but I didn’t get that choice. The walkie-talkie at Lalique’s hip squawked and she answered it. All I could make out was that they had

“another one stuck” and “Bring your machete.”

Lalique said, “You get to see the Dragon’s Teeth first, and you get to see them in action.”

We followed her to the house and armed ourselves with machetes. Didn’t even occur to me to get my shotgun out of the hover—if Lalique said best dealt with by machete, I believed her.

Dragon’s Tooth or not, she’d had experience with it and I hadn’t.

If it was a Dragon’s Tooth, it belonged in the slower-than-molasses family. We took a long
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leisurely hike across the pasture. (Mabob got a chance to stretch his legs. Leo got a chance to find out what a cow pie was.) Once we got close enough to hear the calf squealing, I’d have stepped a little more lively, but Lalique just plodded along as before.

Leo glanced at me, frowning at the sound. I shrugged. We stuck with Lalique.

Mabob gronked and made a short gallop ahead but the minute he saw Leo wasn’t following he did a hasty about-face and galloped back.

The squeals had attracted the attention of a good-sized part of the herd. They were all standing about, watching anxiously, doing nothing—pretty standard cow behavior. From the far side of the herd, a skinny kid in a splashy red shirt waved and shouted. “Over here, Lalique!”

Had to be Jibril, Lalique’s third. He’d gotten two feet taller since the last time I’d seen him, but he was still as skinny as ever. Skinnier, if that was possible. But it was beginning to look good on him. If Mirabile didn’t already have a Masai Guild, he’d have been the kid to start one up.

Behind him, the stand of canes that edged the pasture looked like somebody’d planted them just to make Jibril look good. They were as straight and slender as he was but a good deal taller—

framing him. The stand was maybe a hundred feet long and I couldn’t see how deep it went. The canes themselves were a rich dark green with splashes of red and orange flower throughout. The red ones matched Jibril’s shirt precisely.

“That’s our Dragon’s Tooth,” said Lalique, pointing in Jibril’s direction.