Mirabile (9 page)

agreed another voice, “you go with ’em, Janzen. You like roo soup.”

“In the meantime,” I said, “stick to the precautions we already discussed.

However, if anyone spots a rex, I want you to notify us immediately. Don’t shoot it.”

“Oh, yes, right. Don’t shoot it,” Sangster mocked.

I looked at her as if she were nuts. “Look,” I said, “if there are more than one, it can lead us to the rest of the mob. Or would you rather just hunt them by guess and by golly? I don’t have the time myself. Are you volunteering?”

That was the right thing to say, too. So I added one last fillip. “Susan?” Susan edged forward.

“Susan will be in charge of collecting the gene samples from each sheep, simply as a precaution.”

This did not make Susan happy—she wanted to go haring off after the kangaroo rexes—but I knew she wouldn’t argue with me in public. “Sample each?” she said.

“That’s right. I don’t want a single one lost. After all, who knows what genes they’ve got hidden in those? Might be, one of them can sprout the Shmoo.”

That brought a bit of laughter. The Shmoo’s a legendary creature that tastes like everything good and drops dead for you if you look at it hungry. The ultimate Dragon’s Tooth, except that Sangster would never use that derogatory term for something she approved of.

The crowd approved our plan, especially the part about collecting gene samples from each sheep. It was a nuisance to do, but I knew it would settle them down.

Herders know as well as anybody how desperately we need diversity within a species. I was
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offering to clone any sheep we lost to the rexes in the process of my investigation. That meant they’d lose the time it took to bring the sheep back to breeding age, but that they wouldn’t lose any genetic variation.

Moustafa volunteered to help Susan with the sampling. So did a handful of others. Then the rest of the crowd dispersed, leaving us to get down to business at last.

Moustafa led the way to the sheep pen where Janzen and Leo had bagged my baby rex. The enclosure looked like every single one I’ve ever seen, identical to those at Gogol, identical to every other one in Last Edges as well, no doubt. The sheep inside sounded like the crowd had—lots of milling, scuffling, and bleating.

The moment we rounded the corner and saw the sheep, I had to clamp my jaw hard to keep from laughing. The sheep were an eye-popping sky blue, every single one of them! Susan did burst into laughter. I elbowed her hard in the ribs. “Don’t you dare laugh at Mike’s sheep,” I told her.

Mike had been trying for a breed that could eat Mirabilan plant life without killing itself. What he’d gotten was a particularly hardy type that tasted just as good as the original, but sprouted that unbelievable shade of blue wool. Mike had promptly dubbed them “Dylan Thomas sheep,”

and offered them out to the herders. Janzen and Moustafa had obviously taken him up on the offer.

Susan simmered down, just barely, to giggles. “But, Mama Jason,” she said, “all this fuss because a Dragon’s Tooth might eat a Dragon’s Tooth…”

And at that Janzen laughed too. He looked at Susan. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but, now that you mention it, it is funny.” He cocked an eyebrow at Moustafa, who sighed and said, “You always were nuts, Janzen. Yeah. It’s funny.”

Moustafa looked at me more seriously, though. “But we can’t afford to lose many. It’s not as if we’ve got a high population to play around with. We don’t even dare interbreed them with the Earth-authentics until we’ve built up the flock to twice this size or more.”

I nodded. The kid was as sensible as Janzen. I wasn’t surprised he’d taken a shot at the rex. In his position, I probably would have too. Hell, I’d have done it if they’d been the Earth-authentics.

Why mess around? “Okay, Susan,” I said, “Start with this flock. Make sure you get one of each.”

If the artificial wombs were free this winter, I’d see Mike’s pet project doubled, whether we needed them or not. Pretty damn things once you got over the initial shock. They smelled godawful, of course, but what sheep doesn’t? The wool made beautiful cloth and even more beautiful rugs. It was already something of a posh item all over Mirabile.

“All yours,” I said to Susan, and she and Moustafa set to work.

I followed Leo along the fence, watching where I put my feet. When you’ve got an expert tracker, you stay out of his way and’let him do his job. Janzen knew this just as well as I did, so he was the one, not me, who grabbed Sangster to keep her from overstepping Leo and messing up any signs of the rex.

It wasn’t long before Leo stopped and pointed us off across the sheep field. I shouldered my gear and we set out to track the kangaroo rex.

Tracking a kangaroo isn’t as easy as you might think, even with the help of a world-class tracker like Leo. (I’m not so bad at it myself. Neither is Janzen, as it turns out.) These kangaroos were reds (I don’t mean the warning-light red that signals that some critter is about to chain up to something else; I mean a lovely tawny animal red) and they are world-class distance jumpers, especially when they’re panicked. They had been by Moustafa’s rifle shot, which meant they’d been traveling in leaps of fifteen to twenty feet. So it was check the launch spot, then cast about for the landing and subsequent relaunch.

It was only guesswork that we were following the rex’s mother anyway. We wouldn’t know her to look at her. Only a full gene-read could tell us that. I’d have to sample most of the roos in the
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mob to find out how many of them were capable of producing baby rexes.

Sangster bent down to uproot a weed or two. When I frowned at her for taking the time, she held out the plant to me and said, “That’ll kill a sheep as sure as a kangaroo rex will.”

Janzen looked over. “Surer,” he said. “I still don’t know if kangaroo rexes eat sheep.” To me, he added, “But that will poison one. That’s lambkill.”

I almost laughed. Like any Mirabilan species we’ve had occasion to work with, it has a fancy Latin name, but this was the first I’d heard its common name. The fancy Latin name is an exact translation. Sounded like Granddaddy Jason’s work to me.

Sangster stooped to pull another. Curious how small they were. Must mean they policed the fields very carefully. These were newly sprouted. I spotted one and pulled it myself, then stuck my head up and looked for Leo again. He’d found the next set of footprints.

Good thing the roos have such big feet. In this kind of wiry, springy scrub we wouldn’t have had much chance otherwise. Leo wiped sweat from his forehead and pointed toward the oasis in the distance. “Chances are they’ll be there, including our rex’s mother. In this heat, they’ll be keeping to the shade to conserve water.” He glanced at Janzen. “Is that the only natural source of water in the area?”

Janzen nodded.

I squinted into the shimmer. The plants had that spiky look of Mirabilan vegetation. There was a distinct break between the Earth-authentic lichens and scrub, then a fence, then a broad strip of desert, then the dark green of the Mirabilan oasis.

The broad strip of desert was maybe twenty hops for a roo, or looked that way from this angle.

“Even the roos are a problem,” Sangster observed. “They can hop the fence—they bring the lambkill seeds in on their fur.”

“It’d blow in from there,” I said. “Same as it did at Gogol.” I couldn’t help it. I’d been wondering ever since I first spotted her in the crowd. “Herder Sangster, what made you leave Gogol?”

Sangster scowled, not exactly at me. “It’s Grafter Sangster now. I lost my flock, seventy percent of it anyway.”

Leo said, “To the kangaroo rexes?”

She just about glared him into the ground. “To the lambkill,” she said. “After we got rid of the rexes and the roos that bred them, the lambkill was still there. Worse than ever, it seemed.”

“Yes,” Janzen put in. “When Moustafa and I were deciding where to raise Mike’s flock of Thomas sheep, I did some checking in the various areas available.

Something in the EC here makes the lambkill less prevalent… or less deadly perhaps.

The death count attributable to it isn’t nearly as high here as it is around Gogol.” He cocked his head, which made his resemblance to Leo all the stronger. “Say! Maybe you could find out what the difference is?”

“Maybe I could,” I said, making it clear I would certainly look into the problem.

“But for now let’s find those roos. I’ll put Susan on soil and vegetation samples as soon as she’s done with sheep.”

To my surprise, he frowned. “Isn’t she a little young…?”

“When’s your birthday?” I asked him. When he told me, I said, “Yeah, I guess from your point of view she is a little young. You’ve got two months on her.”

“Oops,” said Janzen. “Sorry.”

“No skin off my nose,” I told him.

Leo grinned and slapped Janzen on the shoulder. “Would be skin off his if Susan had heard him, though. Rightly, too.” Leo put an easy arm around Janzen’s shoulder. “Susan’s the one who developed the odders, Janz. You know, the neo-otters that keep the canals around Torville free of clogweed?”

Janzen looked rightly impressed. Good for Leo, I thought, rub it in just enough so the lesson takes.

“Besides,” Leo said, “if age had any bearing on who gets what job, Annie and I would be sitting in the shade somewhere sipping mint juleps and fanning ourselves.

Now, could we get on with this before we all, young and old alike, melt?”

So we did. The strip of desert was wider than I’d thought. We’d need that spring as much as the roos did. Of course, they were quite sensibly lying in the shade (drinking mint juleps, no doubt, whatever they were—I’d have to remember to ask Leo about that later), going nowhere until the cool of evening.

We’d lost our specific roo (if we’d ever had her) on the broad rocky flat that lay between the strip of desert and the oasis. We paused in the first bit of welcoming shade.

Without a word, Leo signed the rest of us to wait while he moved further in to scout the location of the mob without panicking it. I handed him the cell-sampler. If he saw anything that looked like a rex, I wanted an instant sample. I needed to know if more than one mother was breeding them.

For a long while, it was quiet, except for the sound of running water and the damned yakking of the chatterboxes. Every planet must have something like this—it’s simply the noisiest creature in the EC. It keeps up a constant racket unless something disturbs it. When the chatterboxes shut up, you know you’re in trouble.

Most people think the chatterboxes are birds, and that’s good enough most ways—they fly, they lay eggs, what more could you ask of birds?

I, for one, prefer that my birds have feathers. Technically speaking, feathers are required. The chatterboxes are a lot closer to lizards. I guess the closest Earth-authentic would be something like a pterodactyl, except that all the pterodactyl reconstructions in ships’ files showed them brown or green. I wonder what the paleontologists back on Earth would have made of ours.

The chatterboxes, besides being noisy, are the most vivid colors imaginable—blues and reds and purples and yellows—and in some of the most tasteless combinations you can imagine. They make most Mirabilan predators violently ill, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The eggs are edible though, and not just to

Mirabilan predators.

We watched and listened to the chatterboxes, thinking all the while, I’m sure, that we ought to bring home some eggs if we lucked onto a nest.

Then Leo was back.

He leaned close and spoke in a quiet voice. The chatterboxes kept right on.

“Annie, I’ve found the mob, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a rex—nothing out of the ordinary at all. Just browsing kangaroos.”

“Chances are, mine is the first one, then. Do you think we can all get a look without sending them in all directions?”

“Depends on your big feet.”

“Thanks,” I told him.

The whole bunch of us headed out as quietly as we knew how. I’d been worried about Sangster, but she’d obviously taken the kids’ training course to heart—she was as quiet as the rest of us.

We worked our way through sharpscrub, dent-de-lion, careless weed, spurts, and stick-me-quick.

It was mostly uphill. The terrain here was mostly rock with a very slender capping of soil. Leo brushed past a stand of creve-coeur and collected a shirtful of its nasty burrs, saving us all from a similar fate. I didn’t envy him the task of picking them out.

At last Leo stopped us. Kneeling, he slid forward, motioning me to follow. Our
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faces inches apart, we peered through a small stand of lighten-me.

There was the tiny trickle of stream that fed this oasis. In the shade of the surrounding trees lolled the mob of kangaroos, looking for the moment not so much like a mob as like a picnic luncheon. There were perhaps twenty in clear view, and not a striped hip among them. Still, that meant there were plenty more we couldn’t see.

It was also quite possible that the mother of our rex had been ostracized because of her peculiar offspring. That happened often enough with Dragon’s Teeth.

Beside me there was an intake of breath. The chatterboxes paused momentarily, then, to my relief, went right back to their chattering. Sangster pointed into the sharpscrub to my left.

I caught just the quickest glimpse of stripes, followed it to the end of its bound.

As it knelt on its forepaws to drink from the stream, I could see it had the face and jaw of a red kangaroo, but the haunches were very faintly striped. I nodded to her.

Good bet, that one. Different enough to be worth the first check.

Taking the cell-sampler back from Leo, I backed up—still on my hands and knees—and skinned around to get as close as I could. (Skinned being the operative word in that EC. My palms would never be the same.) Just at that moment, two of the adolescents started a kicking match.

Their timing was perfect. I took advantage of the distraction, rose, tiptoed forward, and potted Striped Rump with the sampler. It twitched and looked around but wasn’t in the least alarmed.