Mirabile (2 page)

Leo gave a smile that was a match for Elly’s. Definitely the EC, I thought. Then he thrust out a huge welcoming hand and said, “That’s Leo to you, as I don’t imagine I could outshout you.”

That assessment visibly impressed Ilanith.

“Annie,” I said. I took the hand. Not many people have hands the size of mine. In Denness I’d met my match for once. Surprised me how good that felt. He didn’t let go immediately and I wasn’t all that anxious for him to do so.

Ilanith eyed him severely. “Leo, there’s no need to be grabby!” She tapped his hand, trying to make him let go.

“Shows how much you know about ship’s manners,” Leo said. “I was about to offer the lady my arm, to escort her into the dining room.”

“Perfectly good old-time ritual,” I said. “I can stand it if he can.”

Leo held out his arm, ship’s formal; I took it. We went off rather grandly, leaving Ilanith all the more suspicious that we’d made it up for her benefit.

Leo chuckled as we passed beyond her earshot. “She won’t believe that until she double-checks with Elly.”

“I know. Good for ’em—check it out for yourself, I always say. Have you heard any bellowing off the loch?”

“Yes,” he said, “I have heard a couple of unusual sounds off the loch lately. I’ve no way of knowing if they’re all made by the same creature. But I’ve lived here long enough to know that these are new. One is a kind of sucking gurgle. Then there’s something related to a cow’s lowing”—he held up a hand—“

not cow and not red deer either. I know both. And there’s a bellow that’ll bring you out of a sound sleep faster than a shotgun blast.”

His lips flattened a bit. “I can’t vouch for that one. I’ve only heard it awakening from sleep. It might have been a dream, but it never feels like dream—and the bellow Stirzaker gave was a fair approximation of it.”

The lines across his forehead deepened. “There’s something else you should know, Annie. Jen’s been acting spooked, and neither Elly nor I can make any sense of it.”

“I saw. I thought she was still keyed up over the monster business.”

He shook his head. “This started weeks ago, long before Stirzaker and Pastides got everybody stirred up. ”

“I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Anything I can do to help,” he said. He swung his free hand to tell me how extensive that

“anything” actually was. “On either count. ”

“Right now, you watch me eat a big plate of my shrimp with Chris’s barbecue sauce on ’em.”

Loch Moose was the only source of freshwater shrimp on Mirabile, and they were one of my triumphs. Not just the way they tasted when Chris got done with them, but because I’d brought the water lilies they came from myself and planted them down in Loch Moose on the chance
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they’d throw off something good. Spent three years making sure they stabilized. Got some pretty dragonflies out of that redundancy, too. Elly’s kids use ’em for catching rock lobsters, which is another thing Chris cooks to perfection.

By the time I’d finished my shrimp, the dining room was empty except for a couple of people I knew to be locals like Leo. I blinked my surprise, I guess.

Leo said, “Most of the guests checked out this morning. Let’s take advantage of it.” He picked up my glass and his own and bowed me toward one of the empty booths.

I followed and sank, sighing, into overstuffed comfort. “Now,” I said, “tell me what you heard from Stirzaker and Pastides.”

He obliged in detail, playing both roles. When he was done, I appreciated his reputation for story telling, but I knew as well he’d given me an accurate account, right down to the two of them tripping over each other’s words in their excitement.

Their description of the chimera would have scared the daylights out of me— if they’d been able to agree on any given part of it aside from the size. Stirzaker had seen the thing reach for him with two great clawlike hands. Pastides had seen the

loops of a water snake, grown to unbelievable lengths, undulate past him. They agreed again only when it came to the creature’s bellow.

When all was said, I had to laugh. “I bet their granddaddy told them scary bedtime stories too!”

“Good God,” said Leo, grinning suddenly. “The Loch Ness monster! I should have recognized it!”

“From which description?” I grinned back. Luckily the question didn’t require an answer.

“Mama Jason!”

That was all the warning I got. Susan—all hundred pounds of her—pounced into my lap.

“They were dumbstruck, both of them,” she said, her manner making it clear that this was the most important news of the century. “You should have seen them eat!

Tell her, Noisy—you saw!”

“Hello to you too,” I said, “and I just got the full story, complete with sound effects.”

That settled her down a bit, but not much. At sixteen, nothing settles them down.

Sliding into the seat beside me, she said, “Now you tell—about the biting cockroaches.”

Well, I’d have had to tell that one sooner or later, so I told it for two, ending with Mike’s heroic attempt to rescue the red daffodils.

Susan’s eyes went dreamy. “Fireflies,” she said. “Think how pretty they’d be around the lake at night!”

“I was,” I said, all too curtly. “Sorry,” I amended, “I’m still pissed off about them.”

“I’ve got another one for you,” Susan said, matching my scowl. “Rowena who lives about twenty miles that way”—she pointed, glanced at Leo (who nudged her finger about 5 degrees left), then went on—“

that way, claims that the only way to keep from raising Dragon’s Teeth is to spit tobacco on your plants whenever you go past them.” She gave another glance at Leo, this one a different sort of query. “I

think she believes that. I know she does it!”

“‘Fraid so,” Leo said.

“Well, we’ll know just what EC to check when something unusual pops out of Rowena’s plants, won’t we?” I sighed. The superstitions really were adding to our problems.

“Mama Jason,” said Susan—with a look that accused me of making a joke much too low for her age level—“How many authentics need tobacco-spit ECs to pop up?”

“No joke, honey. It’s not authentic species I’d expect under conditions like that.

It’d be Dragon’s Teeth plain and probably not so simple.” I looked from one to the other.

“Keep an eye on those plants for me. Anything suddenly flowers in a different color or a slightly different form, snag a sample and send it to me fast!”

They nodded, Susan looking pleased with the assignment, Leo slightly puzzled.

At last Leo said, “I’m afraid I’ve never understood this business of Dragon’s Teeth…” He broke off, suddenly embarrassed.

“Fine,” I said, “as long as you don’t spit tobacco on the ragweed or piss on the petunias or toss the soapy wash water on the lettuce patch.”

Susan eyed me askance. I said, “Last year the whole town of Misty Valley decided that pissing on the petunias was the only way to stabilize them.” I threw up my hands to stave off the question that was already on the tip of Susan’s tongue. “I

don’t know how that got started, so don’t ask me. I’m not even sure I want to know! The end result, of course, was that the petunias seeded ladybugs.”

“Authentic?” Susan asked.

“No, but close enough to be valuable. Nice little insectivores and surprisingly well-suited for doing in ragmites.” The ragmites are native and a bloody nuisance.

“And before you ask,” I added, “the things they might have gotten in the same EC

included a very nasty species of poisonous ant and two different grain-eaters, one of which would chain up to a salamander with a taste for quail eggs.”

“Oh, my!” said Susan. “Misty Valley’s where we get our quail eggs!

“So does everybody on Mirabile,” I said. “Nobody’s gotten the quail to thrive anywhere else yet.” For Leo’s benefit, I added, “So many of our Earth-authentic species are on rocky ground, we can’t afford to lose a lot of individuals to a

Dragon’s Tooth.”

Leo still looked puzzled. After a moment, he shook his head. “I’ve never understood this business. Maybe for once I could get a simple explanation, suitable for a bellmaker…?”

I gestured to Susan. “My assistant will be glad to give you the short course.”

Susan gave one of those award-winning grins. “It goes all the way back to before we left Earth, Leo.” Leo arched an eyebrow: “‘We’?” Susan punched him—lightly—on the arm and said,

“You know what I mean! Humans!”

She heaved a dramatic sigh and went on in spite of it all. “They wanted to make sure we’d have everything we might possibly need.”

“I thought that’s why they sent along the embryo and gene banks,” Leo said.

Susan nodded. “It was. But at the time there was a fad for redundancy—every system doubled, tripled, even quadrupled—so just to make sure we couldn’t lose a species we might need, they built all that redundancy into the gene pool too.”

She glanced at me. She was doing fine, so I nodded for her to go on.

“Look, Noisy. They took the genes for, say, sunflowers and they tucked ’em into a twist in wheat helices. Purely recessive, but when the environmental conditions are right, maybe one one-hundredth of your wheat seeds will turn out to sprout sunflowers.”

She leaned closer, all earnestness. “And one one-hundredth of the sunflowers, given the right EC, will seed bumblebees, and so on and so forth. That’s what Mama Jason calls ‘chaining up.’ Eventually you might get red deer.”

Leo frowned. “I don’t see how you can go from plant to animal…”

“There’s usually an intermediate stage—a plant that comes out all wrong for that plant but perfect for an incubator for whatever’s in the next twist.” She paused dramatically, then finished,

“As you can see, it was a perfectly dumb idea.”

I decided to add my two bits here. “The idea wasn’t as dumb as you make out, kiddo. They just hadn’t worked the bugs out before they stuck us with it.”

“When she says bugs

,” Susan confided grimly to Leo, “she means

Dragon’s

Teeth.”

I stepped in again. “Two things went wrong, Leo. First, there was supposed to be an easy way to turn anything other than the primary helix off and on at will. The problem is that information was in the chunk of ships’ records we lost, and it was such new knowledge at the time that it didn’t get passed to anyone on the ship.

“The second problem was the result of pure goof. They forgot that, in the long run, all plants and animals change to suit their environment. A new mutation may be just the thing for our wheat, but who knows what it’s done to those hidden sunflowers? Those—and the chimerae—are the real Dragon’s Teeth.”

Leo turned to Susan. “Want to explain the chimerae as long as you’re at it?”

“A chimera is something that’s, well, sort of patched together from two, maybe three, different genetic sources. Ordinarily it’s nothing striking—you’d probably only notice if you did a full gene-read. But with all those hidden sets of genes, just about anything can happen.”

“Kangaroo rex, for example,” I said. “That one was a true chimera: a wolf in kangaroo’s clothing.”

“I remember the news films,” Leo said. “Nasty.”

“Viable, too,” I said. “That was a tough fight. I’m still sorry I lost.” It still rankled, I discovered.

Leo looked startled.

“I wanted to save ’em, Leo, but I got voted down. We really couldn’t afford a new predator in that area.”

“Don’t look so shocked, Noisy,” Susan said. “You never know what might be useful some day.

Just suppose we get an overpopulation of rabbits or something and we need a predator to balance them out before they eat all our crops. That’s why Mama Jason wanted to keep them.”

Leo looked unconvinced, Susan looked hurt suddenly. “Just because it’s ugly, Leo,” she said, “doesn’t mean you wipe it out. There’s nothing pretty about a rock lobster but it sure as hell tastes good.”

“I grant you that. I’m just not as sure about things that think taste good.”

I

Susan folded her arms across her chest and heaved another of those dramatic sighs. “Now I know what you’re up against, Mama Jason,” she said. “Pure ignorance.”

That surprised me. I held my tongue for once, waiting to see how Leo would take that.

“Nothing pure about it,” he said. “Don’t insult a man who’s trying to enlighten himself. That never furthered a cause.” He paused, then added, “You sound like you take it very personally.”

Susan dropped her eyes. There was something in that evasion that wasn’t simple embarrassment at overstepping good manners. When she looked up again, she said, “I’m sorry, Leo. I just get so mad sometimes. Mama Jason—”

This time I had to come to her rescue. “Mama Jason sets a bad example, Leo. I come up here and rave about the rampant stupidity everywhere else. Susan, better to educate people than insult them. If I say insulting things about them when I’m in family that’s one thing.

But I would never say to somebody who was concerned about his kids or his crops what you just said to Leo.

“Yeah. I know. I’m sorry again.”

“Forgiven,” said Leo. “Better you make your mistakes on me and learn from them than make

’em on somebody else who might wallop you and turn you stubborn.”

Susan brightened. “Oh, but I

am stubborn, Leo! You always say so!”

“Stubborn, yes.

Stupid stubborn—not that I’ve seen.”

Again there was something other than embarrassment in her dropped eyes. I tried to puzzle it out, but I was distracted by a noise in the distance.

It came from the direction of the loch—something faint and unfamiliar. I cocked my head to listen harder and got an earful of sneezes instead.

“S-sorry!” Susan gasped, through a second series of sneezes. “P-pollen!” Then she was off again, her face buried in a napkin.

Leo caught my eye. He thought the sneezing fit was as phony as I did.

“Well,” I said, “you may be allergic to the pollen”—she wasn’t, I knew very well—“but I came hoping I’d timed it right to see Loch Moose smoke. And to get in some contemplative fishing”— meaning I didn’t intend to bait my hook—“before it gets too dark.”