Mirabile (22 page)

When I got within view of what she was doing, I didn’t interrupt her at once. For one thing, I wasn’t sure I should distract her while she was carving. For another, it was a treat to watch as she freed another Dragon’s Tooth from its chunk of rock. I didn’t recognize this one, so it must have been something from the local EC that Sabah and his team had taken care of. Even now, it was in the act of raising a club-like foot as if to bash in a skull.

The foot raised, there was a sudden startling silence. Bethany had turned off her carver and doffed her elaborate face mask. “Annie! You shouldn’t be hanging out here without a mask. This stuff is hell on your lungs.”

“I didn’t intend to hang out. I got suckered into watching you… find the Dragon’s Tooth.”

She looked enormously pleased at that. One hand went up to the stone. She meant, I think, simply to brush away the stone dust, but the gesture turned into a caress. I couldn’t blame her.

All her creatures wanted patting, even the ones that looked like they’d take your hand off for trying.

After a minute, she turned. “Did you come to watch us install the bell? If so, you’re about an hour early.”

I shook my head. “I came to ask about these bat things you folks seem to want.”

“Oh, no! The kids!” She looked stricken. “Annie, I’m so sorry. Leo made us promise not to hassle you for bats. I made the kids promise… Wait till I get my hands on those little monsters!”

I had to hold up both my hands to stop her. “The kids didn’t ask me for bats for your guild! I won’t have you punishing them either—when all they did was suggest that I give Leo bats as a courting present.“ And I couldn’t help laughing. ”Clever pair, too. Wish you could have seen them at it. You’d have been proud of them.“

“I’m afraid I can imagine.” She laughed. Through her laughter, she managed to get out, “I am sorry, though, Annie.”

“Don’t be. Tell me about the bats.”

“There’s nothing much to tell. Besides bells, belfries are reputed to have bats.

They’re supposed to have bats. I did the next best thing. Come on, I’ll show you.”

So it was up the stairs to the belfry all over again. This time, she pointed up to the ceiling. First time there, I’d been so caught up by the view outside that I hadn’t seen the view inside: the entire ceiling was carved.

“That’s what they look like—the bats. We couldn’t talk Sabah into making us some, so I carved them in. But that won’t satisfy most of the guild members.”

The bats wanted petting too, or at least a much closer look. The buttressed ceiling was covered with them, hundreds of them. At first it wasn’t easy to make out individual details, then I realized they were all hanging by their feet, faces downward.

And it was the damndest collection of faces I’d ever seen—huge, outsized ears, noses that looked more like leaves than noses. There were even a dozen or so that seemed to have Pushy’s old-boot head. Most of those with their mouths open showed needle-sharp teeth. They had wings too, it seemed—not like birds’ wings, though—more like, well, broken umbrellas. Hard to believe something like that was

Earth-authentic.

“You sure these aren’t Dragon’s Teeth?” I said.

Bethany grinned. “I got the pictures I worked with straight out of ships’ records, Annie. They really do look like that. The only artistic license I took was, well, ordinarily you’d see only one kind of bat in a belfry. I put them all in. I liked their faces.”

“I can see why. I’ll see what I can do, Bethany. Mind you, I don’t make any promises. First, I have to take a good look at what they’d do to the ecology…”I
Page 86

suspected Sabah had already done that, since he’d warned me about the request.

But a double check never hurt anything, and it would be something to take my mind off the birds long enough to give it a rest.

“Good enough, Annie. Uh—okay if I tell the rest of the guild members you’re looking into it?”

“Why not? At least it will keep them from finding devious ways to mention the subject.”

As long as I’d already climbed the stairs, I stuck around to watch them hang Leo’s bell. Carved bats and cast pansies. Made me wonder what the folks back on Earth would have thought— d’you suppose they appreciate bats and pansies as much as Leo and his kin?

“We took a vote, Annie,” Bethany said. The workers around her nodded agreement. “You get the first ring.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but it seems to me Leo ought to have the privilege. I haven’t done anything yet.”

There was some disappointment, followed by a moment’s discussion, then Bethany said, “She’s right. Leo made the bell. He ought to get first ring. How about just at dusk?

You’ll bring him, Annie?” At my nod, she said, “At dusk, then.”

So I headed back to Bethany’s to tell Leo his plans for the evening. He was still at the computer.

When I laid a hand on his shoulder, he said, “No luck so far, Annie, but I’m still looking.”

“Take a break, Leo. Let me at the computer for a while.”

“I can do this. I’m not bored; I’m fascinated. I had no idea how many kinds of birds there were!”

I made shooing motions. “I have no intention of spoiling your fun. I just want to have a look at these bats.”

That got his attention. “Annie, they didn’t! They promised me!”

“They didn’t,” I said. “It was Sabah who told me about the bats. Anybody else, I had to ask. Now will you let me at the computer?”

He gave me his chair and drew up another. I went hunting for bats. The very first reference I found made my jaw drop. Tagged onto the description, almost as an afterthought, were the words, “Most bats are economically valuable because of the volume of insects they consume.”

“But…?” I did a quick test. No, asking the computer for a list of “insectivores”

did not give you “bats.”

“Leo,” I said, “we lost part of the index!” We knew we’d lost information from ships’ records, but that we’d lost indexing… God alone knew what was in the computer files—things we might need badly that we’d never know existed!

The first order of business then was a general bulletin to let everybody know there was information in the files that wasn’t properly indexed and cross-referenced.

Nobody was going to be happy to hear that. Still, a general bulletin meant that whenever somebody found something unindexed in the files, they’d tell library so it could be added.

When we’d done that (and dropped a note to the ships’ librarians to cross-reference “bats” to

“insectivores”), I went back to sort through the various kinds of bats. And I did it manually, file by file. After a while I had a goodly number of insectivorous bats that would do just fine not only in RightHere’s EC but in the

Loch Moose EC as well. In theory, at least.

In practice…

I found motion pictures of each of the Earth-authentic species that interested me.

Some of them weren’t very good—bats being largely nocturnal—but they’d have to do. “What do you say, Leo? Do these get eaten the minute we turn ’em loose?”

“Not by whompems,” he said. “Not if they’re nocturnal.”

“So far so good,” I said. “You keep thinking about it while I read up on bats.”

But I didn’t do that immediately. Instead, I dropped a note to my own team which said, in its entirety: “Bats. Love, Annie.” I knew that would be enough to get them started. That’s why they’re my favorite team. I also left a note for Sabah. That one said: “Bats, dammit, Sabah!” I signed it “Ann Jason Masmajean.” I can’t pull rank on Sabah, but I made sure the graphics underscored the “Jason.” Sabah hadn’t even looked at bats; he’d simply decided they were

“frivolities” and let it go at that. Just goes to show—if you don’t have time for frivolities, you’re not doing it right.

Then I got to the reading. The more I read about them, the more I liked them.

I admit the vampire bats gave me a momentary turn… until I found out they didn’t much bother humans. Real pretty bioengineering—all designed to keep its prey from noticing it was being bled, which was more than you could say for the human culture back on Earth I’d once read about that bled cattle for their favorite beverage, a concoction of blood and milk. Curious, when Earth humans were doing that, that the vampire bat should have given all bats such a bad rap, the way it seemed to have.

Maybe the problem was just that bats are nocturnal. If nobody knows what you do for sure, everybody suspects you.

Anyhow, I was interested in insectivores, which was the largest group. And when I found one that was noted for its mosquito catching, I knew in my heart I’d found my insectivore of choice. I turned the computer over to Leo and headed out for Stock.

That was Ashok Saver Ndamba’s province. He’d turned the landing skiffs into a combination storage bin and museum, and he ruled his territory with an iron hand. It always surprised me that he knew where everything was. Random access filing of the most eclectic sort. Luckily, there was nothing wrong with his indexing.

“Bats,” he said. “I see the cathedral-builders got to you. You always were a softie.”

“Who, me?” I said. “You must be thinking of somebody else. You know how badly we need insectivores?”

“Yes?”

“Bats,” I said.

He looked up from his screen long enough for me to grin once and nod, then he shook his head and whistled. “I’ve got about five hundred kinds.”

That didn’t gibe with what I’d been reading. “Supposed to be twice that, according to the references I’ve been reading.”

“Did you check the dates of the references? A lot of species went missing in the Bad Years. If it was extinct, they didn’t send it with us.”

I had to admit I hadn’t checked dates. He was only partially right. By the time of the Mirabilan expedition, the geneticists had been reconstructing some of those extinct species. “Let’s see what you’ve got. Here—this one—

Myotis lucifugus

.

Let’s start with that.”

“At least you picked one we’ve got,” he said and wandered off humming to himself to find the embryo stores. He wasn’t humming when he came back. “Annie, I’ve got bad news.”

“How bad?”

“Those idiots back on Earth stiffed us. I’ve got a sum total of forty embryos and even I know enough about jasoning to know that’s not enough for a viable population.”

I was not about to give up my mosquito-eaters without a fight. “Spare me what you can, then,
Page 88

Ashok. If I have to build ’em by hand, I will.”

“For you, Annie, the whole batch, if you’re willing to take them a few at a time. I also know enough to know that’ll take some of the drudgery out of it.”

“I accept.”

We stayed just long enough in RightHere to give Leo first ring of the bell. I wasn’t about to work in somebody else’s lab when I could be home and surrounded by my own team. The message had done the job. By the time I walked in with my bat embryos, half the team was expert on the subject of bats.

This was not necessarily a good thing—it meant each and every one of them had a favorite bat to promote. “I brought my favorite,” I said. “Anybody wants vampire bats can go get his own embryos.”

Susan brightened perceptibly. “Really, Mama Jason?”

“Not really. That’d be a tough call. You’d have to do a lot of convincing. Any of the insectivores, fine. And somebody might think in terms of fruit bats for Encamacion—it’d save them all that hand-pollinating. Talk to Leo before you do anything though. He can tell you which ones will give you the best shot at viability.”

In the end, Leo’d had only one problem with my mouse-eared bats and that was the way they hung when they were at rest. He was worried they’d be attacked by stickytoes. So the moment I’d stored my embryos and the rest of my gear, we went out into the woods to watch the stickytoes in action, something I hadn’t done since I was a kid.

A stickytoes is about a foot long and doesn’t really have sticky toes, not in the gluey sense. It has a burr-like pad on each of its feet which lets it climb like nobody’s business. The best part is that the burrs are so effective, the damn thing can come down a tree headfirst.

What Leo wanted me to see was the amount of damage a single stickytoes could do to the fruits of one of the local trees. The fruit wasn’t human edible so the tree hadn’t acquired a common name among the adults. When I was a kid, we’d called it

“critterfruit” because of the resemblance to some sort of small furry brown animal.

Having taken a fresh look, I was ready to revise that to “batfruit.” I could see Leo’s point. That could be a problem. I watched the stickytoes hang from the bottom of a limb to eat its way along the branch. Batfruit after batfruit vanished into the stickytoes’s gullet. Those teeth were sharp enough to crack the protective shell inside the hairy covering.

“Wanna bet the tree can’t propagate without a stickytoes to crack the seed open?”

“Annie, I never take that sort of bet—not with you!” Then he said, “How much of a problem is it?”

“A bit,” I said. “Am I remembering correctly that stickytoes are omnivorous?”

He nodded. “You are. And they have no problem with Earth-authentic meat either. Down at Loch Moose I’ve seen them eat mice.”

“A taste for mice is altogether too close for comfort. It’s not going to be easy to build up a sizable population of bats. They only have one offspring a year on the average. Ordinarily they live about twenty years but—”

“But not if the stickytoes try them and like them.”

“So I’ll have to make damn sure the stickytoes won’t try them. Hell, if I have to make bats by hand, I might as well go all the way. Let’s head back. You can spend the afternoon telling me all the things a stickytoes wouldn’t touch on a dare.”

First off, we cloned the hell out of the few embryos we had. That gave us a working base and enough space to screw up one or two without causing a disaster. Then we built our bats by hand, splice by splice. It’s time-consuming but no big deal.

Would have been boring as hell if Elly hadn’t brought the whole troop of kids into town for a
Page 89

look-see. They’d gotten as worked up about bats as the team had. As long as they were around, I let Ilanith try her hand at a couple. She did just fine and couldn’t have been prouder if she’d designed them herself.