Mirabile (16 page)

There was no point heading back to the lab for the night. Pallab offered to put us up and I saw no reason not to take him up on the offer. Why put the kids at the lab through my general crankiness when there was someone who deserved it more?

The first thing I did was commandeer his computer, linked to the main computer back at the lab, and started to run my samples. Then I got introduced to Pallab’s wife and fed at the same time. The wife was anxious. The kids were still at Elly’s.

She’d talked to them and found them still over excited from the night before. I knew how they felt and said as much.

With some good food in me, I felt much better. I leaned back with every intention of taking a break from the problem, glanced at Leo, suddenly remembering that he’d opened this territory, and leaned forward again.

“Hey, Leo! Tell me what you’d use to build a fire?” I realized belatedly that I was not being too clear and was about to explain the question…

But Leo was right there. “I assume you mean when I was solo and I assume you mean in this EC.”

I nodded.

He named some of the local trees. A couple he had to describe to Pallab to learn what common name had been given to them—he’d only learned them by sight or scent in one or two cases. He thought a bit more, then he gave me a startled look.

“Annie!” he said, “the ballyhoos!”

“What about the ballyhoos?”

“They don’t burn worth a damn!” He gave me a second startled look, for all the world as if I might think him crazy.

I didn’t, not in the least, but Pallab said, “That’s crazy, Leo. You saw them yourself last night.

They burned like—” And then he stopped abruptly. He gave Leo a sheepish look.

Leo said, “If you want to start a fire, you strip the bark from a ballyhoo. Better than any kindling you can name. But you don’t put ballyhoo branches on your fire because they don’t burn worth a damn.”

Pallab nodded energetic agreement. “Jillian—Builder Motwani— is still mad that we wasted the ballyhoos we cut down by tossing them into the river.”

“I’d like to talk to her,” I said, “and maybe to your town carpenter too.” I meant when next we had the chance, but Pallab and his wife were up and out to fetch before I could stop either of them.

I eyed Leo. He eyed me. We had just enough time for a nice round of necking before the house was full of people and I was hearing all about the virtues of ballyhoo wood from a furniture maker and a handful of builders. Ballyhoo wood, it seemed, was virtually fireproof. Oh, you could chop it into small pieces and put in on a raging fire and eventually it would burn, but for all intents and purposes…

One of the builders pounded his foot on the floor. “Practically fireproof house,”

he said, “and a good thing too, under the circumstances!”

“Under the circumstances,” I agreed. We were into strange circumstances. That was nothing new for Mirabile.

Irizarry turned up the next day with Jongshik Caner Li in tow. Susan had tagged along for the ride. It was hard to tell whether Susan had come to help out with the EC or to protect her interest in Jongshik. Having saved his life once, she seemed ferociously interested in keeping him healthy.

She needn’t have bothered. What with Irizarry hovering about and with Pallab and the rest of the townsfolk embarrassed as all hell about their respective parts in the mob action, there wasn’t much to worry about on that count.

Still, I knew it wasn’t over. Embarrassment would eventually aggravate their suspicion of him.

After all, if they could prove something against him, their actions would be —in retrospect—

justifiable. Human nature, I suppose, but it’s sure one of those things I’d breed out of the species if I had my way. Not a useful trait.

I was just as glad to see Jongshik myself. Pallab wasn’t sure he could locate the spots he’d seen the earlier fires start up. That didn’t surprise me—the landscape had changed considerably. But between the two of them maybe we could find the places again. Being the caner, Jongshik would have a better idea of where he usually went for his materials, even given the changes in the landscape. At least, I hoped so.

I rounded up Leo and Pallab and headed out to apply to Irizarry for the use of Jongshik. Irizarry pointed across the river: Susan and Jongshik were digging in the thick ash. I hailed them and got back Susan’s signal for five minutes.

It was ten, but when they showed up, they were both tremendously excited. The first five sentences (at least) were completely garbled.

“Do you suppose,” I said to Leo, “that you could slow her down to my speed?”

Leo gave Susan a long look, up and down. “Don’t know which button to push,”

he said, finally.

That had the desired effect. Susan laughed, took a deep breath and started over.

“A whole troop of grumblers moved into the burned area, Mama Jason. They’re out there
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digging and eating as if their lives depended on it. We wanted to see what they were after, so we scared a bunch of them off.”

She paused a moment, as if she expected me to read her the riot act. Since she hadn’t been mauled, I assumed she’d scared them off carefully, so I didn’t say anything.

Having lived through telling me that, she took another deep breath and finished on a note of triumph: “Look what they were eating!” She thrust out two very sooty hands. “Roasted hopfish cysts!”

She poured them into my outstretched hands like so many chestnuts. Sure enough, they were hopfish cysts all right. Roasted and partially gnawed. Even without Susan’s eyewitness evidence I might have guessed they’d been chewed by grumblers; the toothmarks were pretty characteristic.

Leo peered into my cupped hands. “Tasty,” he said.

“I don’t know about that. But it might cut down on how much of our rice they eat next year.”

“Mama Jason?” That was Susan. She looked confused as all hell.

Her excitement had been purely intellectual, I guess. The grumblers would eat hopfish cysts. She hadn’t taken it the next step. “We do a little controlled burning in the rice fields. Roast the cysts, which kills a lot of them. Invite the grumblers in to eat a lot more. Good work, Susan!” I poured the cysts back into her hands.

“Send Mike a full report and have him pass it around. Meanwhile, I’m going to borrow Jongshik here.” To Jongshik, I said, “I want to see the locations of the earlier fires, if you can find them for me.”

Susan gave a suspicious glance at Pallab and a proprietary one at Jongshik. “I’m coming, too.”

I know that tone of voice; I’ve used it enough myself. “All right,” I said, “but that hasn’t gotten you out of the hopfish-grumbler study.”

Irizarry raised an eyebrow as we headed for the boats.

I grinned at him and said, “I’ll let Susan sit between ’em.”

Pallab and Jongshik both looked at their feet. That was good enough for Irizarry—he laughed. “All right then,” he said. He followed us down to push us off.

It was a long trek, but that was better than stirring up the ash with the hover. We passed two more troops of grumblers along the way. Each time we stuck around long enough to verify that they were indeed digging for hopfish cysts. Then we went on.

Eventually we found the sites of both of the previous fires. At least, Jongshik was sure we’d found both spots. There’s not much left of cane after a fire that hot.

No flint outcroppings in either area. That made Jongshik look anxious and Pallab look still more embarrassed. Embarrassed was better than suspicious, I thought.

Irizarry was right—I didn’t think Jongshik was an arsonist.

Seeing the canebrake cheered me. Life, once it catches hold on a world, is damned stubborn. At the stubby bases of the burnt canes, tiny green shoots had already begun to push their way into the sunlight. In a week or two the whole forest would begin to green up again.

For no reason at all, that made me think of Leo. I turned to say something and found him smiling over the shoots as well.

Then we made the long trek back. Night had already begun to fall when we reached Milo’s Ford.

There was more I wanted to do, but it would have to wait until the next day. Susan and I spent the rest of the evening passing our information on to Mike and running our samples through the lab computer.

The next morning, I rousted the bunch early and hustled them through breakfast.

Then I went to get Jongshik as well.

It was Irizarry that met me at the door to Jongshik’s. “Oh, it’s you, Annie. Want to borrow him
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again?”

I cocked my head at him, took in his persuader, which I was betting wasn’t loaded with rock salt.

“Trouble?” I asked.

He laid the gun aside. “Just a precaution. Never know when there might be trouble from the neighbors.”

Tactful fellow, Irizarry. There wouldn’t be trouble from the neighbors as long as they felt Irizarry was guarding Jongshik to make sure they’d have no trouble from him. Economical, killing two birds with one stone like that.

“I’m glad you’ve got a half dozen kids,” I told him. “Ever think of having a few more?”

“Coming from you, Annie, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It wasn’t a pass,” I said. “Sorry, but you don’t get to me the way Leo does.”

He gave a mock sigh. “If only I were ten years older.”

“Make that thirty. I’m not a cradle robber.” By this time, I’d stepped inside the house. Jongshik, still as white-faced as ever, was just finishing his breakfast. “Hi, Jongshik,” I said. “I need to see several canebrakes that didn’t get hit by the fire.

Can you take us to a couple on this side of the river?”

He could, of course, and he would—anything to help— though he didn’t understand how it would since there hadn’t been any flint outcroppings at the sites of the earlier fires… He got even paler as he spoke, casting worried glances at

Irizarry.

For good reason, I suppose, but the lack of flint outcroppings cast as much suspicion on Pallab as it did on him—if we were talking about arson, that is. I said, “I just want a good look at the normal EC.”

Irizarry shrugged and escorted us to the hover. He grinned like a Cheshire cat when I gestured Susan into the back seat between Jongshik and Pallab and stayed to wave us off.

Poor boy! Too damn much ash had sifted its way into town. We left him in a cloud of it. After a bit, though, we reached an area that wasn’t dusted, and we were out of the swirls of soot and into the forest.

Visually, this was the same EC as the far side of the river. At least, as the far side of the river had been before the fire. I wasn’t seeing anything new or different. Both plants and animals seemed to be strictly Mirabilan. It made me all the more peeved that—what with the Earth-authentics and their Dragon’s Teeth—we had so little time to devote to the study of native biology.

Everything we did was purely catch as catch can.

From the previous EC we’d done, I knew there was nothing poisonous to the touch in an area like this. You just didn’t go around putting stuff in your mouth at random. And you went around a killquick if you spotted one. The killquick made spotting easy, being lemon yellow, pumpkin orange, or the like. If it saw you first, it inflated to football size and let out a sound like a foghorn straight out of ships’

records.

We didn’t see a single grumbler as we trudged through the brush. Must have been they were all across the river stuffing themselves on hopfish cysts.

At last Jongshik said, “There! That’s the kind I use!”

There was such relief in his voice, I had to stare at him. It took me a minute to realize that he’d also been worried he might be out of a job if all his sources of raw material had burned up.

“All right,” I said, “samples of everything. Susan, get a chunk of soil—”

“And don’t forget the bugs,” she finished for me. “This is me, not Mike, remember?”

When Mike had started work with the team, he hadn’t known that a soil sample meant everything in that chunk of soil. He’d spent nearly an hour picking the

“extraneous” stuff out of his sample. I considered the whole episode my fault, not his—it’s
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harder to tell what somebody doesn’t know than what he does know, especially when to you it’s a basic assumption.

“Snotty kid,” I said. “I’m going to tell Mike you said that.”

“Oh, no, Mama Jason! Please don’t!”

“Then think before you open your mouth because next time I will tell Mike.”

She nodded emphatically and we all set to business. A little while later Susan was—very politely—showing Jongshik how to take a soil sample, including the bugs. We got leaves and bark, cane and berry, fern and frond. Leo used the sampler gun on a ferret-like creature I’d never seen before that Susan and Jongshik startled out of a burrow with their soil sampling.

As before, there was no flint outcropping in the area. But I did get Jongshik to point out the plant he claimed to have seen burst into flame. It was a new one on me, so I not only took a sample but a specimen as well. Stubborn thing. Two of them came up in a row, then a long underground runner on it with no end in sight, unless it was the specimen several hundred yards to the left of us. We finally settled its hash with the sharp edge of a shovel. Jongshik couldn’t tell me what it was called. Not interesting enough to have a common name. I stuck it in my kit and promised

Jongshik we’d name it after him, at least in its scientific version.

From there I moved on to the popcorn and ballyhoo trees, so I took samples of both bark and wood. Pallab chopped, I gathered.

We were working on a ballyhoo when I realized I couldn’t find any seedpods on the ground around its trunk. I inquired. Pretty soon the whole troop of us were scouting for seedpods.

“Maybe it’s male?” Susan said.

I pointed up. You could see the seedpods, but every one of them was well out of reach. “Just the wrong season for ground-falls,” I said, “or maybe the ballyhoo is a hoarder.”

“A hoarder?” said Pallab.

“Yeah,” Susan told him. “Some plants hang onto their seeds until the conditions favor germination.”