The good new stuff, p.23
The Good New Stuff, page 23
We’re habitually short-handed, and since I’d worked with Leo once before I knew he and I could handle just about anything that came up. As for Susan, well, Earth-authentic wild horses couldn’t have kept her away.
Mike looked glum. “I get stuck with the fish, right?”
“And Selima,” I pointed out, which brightened him up considerably. (I’m rather hoping those two will decide to help alleviate our underpopulation problem one of these fine days. I’m giving them every opportunity.) “We’ll be in touch.”
“We’ll argue,” Mike assured me.
We took my skimmer. Leo, being retired (hah!), no longer rates up-to-date equipment. We let Susan drive and scandalized her by necking in the back seat. When we’d caught up a bit on old times, we broke the clinch.
“Why will you argue?” Leo asked.
“You remember, Noisy. Mama Jason wanted to keep the kangaroo rexes the last time they cropped up. Mike and Chie-Hoon didn’t.”
“A lot of people didn’t want them kept,” I said. “I lost that round.”
“It’s not going to be any easier this time,” Leo said. “Both those herders were—if you’ll pardon the expression—hopping mad.”
Susan giggled. So did I.
“I know. But I’m older and meaner this time around.”
“‘Meaner’?” That was Susan. “Mama Jason, last time one of the damn things almost chewed your foot off!”
“D’you think I could forget something like that?” I leaned on the back of the seat and glared at her in the mirror. “That has nothing to do with it.”
“‘You never know what might be useful in the long run.’ I know,” Susan said. “It’s not as if we’re going to pick up and go back to Earth if we run out of sheep, either.”
I gave a sidelong glance at Leo. “Just what I needed; somebody who quotes my own words back at me … .”
“You’ve only yourself to blame,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Susan, to let us both know she took this little routine as a compliment. “Now tell me who took what side last time around, and what you expect them to do this time.”
“It was me against them,” I admitted. When Susan whistled, [ stuck in, “I almost got Mike to go along with me, but in the end, that wouldn’t have made any difference. Mike didn’t have much pull then.”
“Meaning he was about the same age I am now,” said Susan, “so my opinion won’t swing much weight either.”
“I had intended to be tactful.”
Leo raised an eyebrow at me. “That’s not like you, Annie. Do you need the allies that badly? It occurs to me that you swing a bit more weight these days yourself.”
“Oh, considerably. But that won’t do me a lot of good unless I can convince people like Jarlskog and Yndurain that the rexes are worth keeping. For god’s sake, Leo! What’s to stop them from simply shooting down every one they see? We certainly haven’t the hands to police every last bit of territory, especially not Last Edges or Gogol or the like.”
Last Edges has a total population of fifty. That’s minute, but it’s five times the number of people I’ve got to work with.
“Most people understand enough about ecological balance to follow the guide-lines you folks set,” Leo said, but with a bit of a rising inflection.
“If I tell them it’s ‘Earth-authentic,’ sure. But this one isn’t. Furthermore, nobody in his right mind likes it.”
“I like it,” Susan said. When I didn’t respond to that, she said in a small amused voice, “Oh,” then giggled, then sighed in resignation. “So what do we do?”
“Nothing, until we check out the situation locally.”
The local situation hadn’t simmered down while it waited for our arrival. Not that I’d expected it to, but I could see that both Susan and Leo had. A third of the adults were guarding the sheep field with guns. Another third, I imagine, was guarding the kids likewise. The rest turned out to be a combination welcoming committee and lynch mob. Read: we were welcome, the kangaroo rexes were most emphatically not.
I listened to the babble without a word for all of twenty minutes, motioning for Susan and Leo to do the same. Best to let them get as much of it out of their systems as possible while we waited for a couple of leaders to sort themselves out of the crowd—then we’d know who and what we were actually dealing with.
In the end, there were two surprises. The first was that someone was dispatched to “Go get Janzen. Right now.” When Janzen arrived, Janzen got thrust to the fore. Janzen was about Susan’s age. He looked at me, cocked an eyebrow at Leo, who nodded and grinned, then he grinned at me and stuck out his hand. That was when I noticed the striking resemblance the kid had to Leo. I cocked an eyebrow at Leo, whose grin got wider.
Janzen took care of shutting down the general noise level and introducing us to the population at large. Leo got introduced by his previous job description—as Leonov Opener Denness—and yes, Leo was Janzen’s grandad. Both of which upped our status exactly the way Janzen had intended them to. At a bet, a lot of the local kids had been through a survival course or two with Leo.
The second surprise wasn’t nearly as pleasant. The other speaker for the populace—read “loudmouth” in this case—was none other than Kelly Herder Sangster, formerly a resident of Gogol. She’d wanted the kangaroo rexes near Gogol wiped out and she wanted the same thing here and now.
I knew from experience how good she was at rousing rabble. She’d done it at Gogol. I could talk myself blue in the face, put penalties on the shooting of a rex, but I’d lose every one of them to “accidental” shootings if I couldn’t get the majority of the crowd behind me.
Sangster squared off, aimed somewhere between me and Janzen, shoved back her hat, bunched her fists on her hips, and said, “They eat sheep. Next thing you know they’ll be eating our kids! And Cryptobiology sends us somebody who loves Dragon’s Teeth!”
She pointed an accusing finger at me. “When they attacked us in Gogol, she wanted to keep them! Whaddaya think about that?” The last was to the crowd.
The crowd didn’t think much of that at all. There was much muttering and rumbling.
“I think,” I said, waiting for the crowd to quiet enough to listen, “I’d like to know more about the situation before I make any decisions for or against.”
I looked at Janzen. “You were the first to see it, I’m told. Did it eat your sheep?”
“No, it didn’t,” he said. That caused another stir and a bit of a calm. “It was in the enclosure—but it was chasing them, all of them, the way a dog does when it’s playing. To be fair, I don’t know what it would have done when it caught them. We caught it before we could find out.” He looked thoughtful. “But it seems to me that it had plenty of opportunity to catch a sheep and didn’t bother. Moustafa? What do you think?”
Moustafa rubbed his sore jaw, glowered at Leo, and said, very grudgingly, “You’re right, Janzen. It was like the time Harkavy’s dog got into the sheep pen—just chased ‘em around. Plenty of time to catch ’em but didn’t. Just wanted to see them run.” He glowered once more. “But for a kangaroo, it’s an adolescent. Maybe it hasn’t learned to hunt yet. That might have been practice.”
“I concede the point,” I said, before Sangster could use it to launch another torpedo. “The next thing I need to know is, how many of them are there?”
As if prompted (perhaps he was, I hadn’t been watching Leo for the moment), Janzen said, “For all I know, only the one.” He looked hard at Sangster. “You see any?”
Sangster dropped her eyes. “No,” she muttered, “not since Gogol.” She raised her eyes and made a comeback, “No thanks to Jason Masmajean here.”
Janzen ignored that. “Anybody else?”
“That doesn’t mean a damn thing, Janzen, and you know it,” someone said from the crowd. “For all we know, the entire next generation of kangaroos will be Dragon’s Teeth—and that would be a shitload of kangaroo rexes!”
“I say we get rid of them while there’s only one,” Sangster put in. “I’m for loading my shotgun and cleaning the roos out before they sprout Dragon’s Teeth!”
“Now I remember!” I said, before the crowd could agree with her, “You’re the one that’s allergic to roo-tail soup!”
“I’m not allergic—I just don’t like it,” she snapped back, before thinking it through.
“Well,” said Janzen, “I like roo-tail soup, so I’d just as soon consider this carefully before I stick myself with nothing but vegetable for the rest of my life.”
“Rest of your life …” Sangster sneered at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ll take that question,” I said. “If you’ve a genuine outbreak of kangaroo rexes here, instead of a one-shot, then you’ll have to destroy all the kangaroos. That’s what was done at Gogol. Gogol can never let the kangaroo herds—”
“‘Mobs’” corrected Sangster, “Kangaroos come in mobs, not herds.”
“Gogol can never let the kangaroos mob again. Any kangaroo found in that EC is shot. The environmental conditions there are such that sooner or later any kangaroo around Gogol will produce a kangaroo rex.” I gave a long look through the crowd. “I won’t lie to you: Last Edges has roughly the same EC as Gogol did. Which means you may have to face the same decision. As for me, I’d wait to find out if the rexes eat sheep before I decide to kill off all the roos.”
“Sounds fair,” said Janzen, almost too promptly. “How do we go about this?”
“First, I want a good look at your EC. I want to see, if you haven’t scuffed it up too much, where you spotted the rex. Then we do a little scouting of the surrounding area.” I grinned over my shoulder at Leo. “Luckily, we have somebody who’s an old hand at that.”
“Luckily,” agreed Janzen.
“But I could also use some additional help.” I looked straight at Sangster—I wanted her where I could keep an eye on her and where she couldn’t rabble-rouse while I was busy. “What do you say, Sangster? Willing to put in a little effort?”
What could she say? She just said it with all the bad grace she could muster.
“Take Janzen, too,” came a voice from the crowd. Aha! there were two factions already. “Yes,” 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 filip. “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 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. It 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 skyblue, 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 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 Granpa 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 Crafter 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.”
