Mirabile (8 page)

“I know what you’re thinking, Annie,” Mike said. “You’d better come talk to these guys first.

You’re not going to like what you hear.”

Herders Jarlskog and Yndurain were not inclined toward leniency, especially not Jarlskog, who had worked himself up into a fine sense of outrage. To hear him tell it, you’d have thought a mob of rexes had eaten his entire flock, plus several of his children. So the entire town was already in an uproar.

I halfway agreed with their sentiments. I like the occasional lamb chop just as much as the next guy—especially the way Chris cooks them up—and this was one of only seven flocks on all of Mirabile. Sheep here are labor intensive. They can’t be trusted to graze unattended: forever eating something native that’ll poison them. So we keep only the seven flocks and we keep them on a strict diet of Earth fodder.

All this means that they have to be kept behind fences and that the plant life in there with ‘em has to be policed regularly. That’s one of the reasons all the flocks are on the fringes of the desert—it’s easier to irrigate the plant life into submission.

The result of all this is that we eat a lot more kangaroo tail soup than we eat lamb curry. The kangaroos fend for themselves quite nicely, thank you, and there’s no shortage of them.

Jarlskog wanted me to arrange an instant shortage of kangaroo rexes. So did Yndurain. In an hour’s time, the rest of the town would start calling in with the same demand. I
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soothed them by telling them I’d have a team up there by the end of the day. In the meantime, they were to shoot only if they saw a rex actually in with the sheep.

They grumbled some but agreed. When I canceled the call, I turned to Leo.

“What do you think? Will they go right out and shoot every kangaroo in sight?”

“No,” he said. “Janzen and Moustafa are good kids. I think they can put a damper on the hysteria. Once I convinced Moustafa the rex was mine, he was even willing to help me catch it.”

“It took a bit of convincing though.” I glanced significantly at his skinned knuckles.

He grinned and shrugged. “In the heat of passion.” His face turned serious and he added, “He’ll shoot any roo that jumps that fence today, though, so if you want to head up there, now’s the time.”

Mike handed me a sheaf of hard copy. It was the list of everybody who lived in a hundred-mile radius of the spot where the rex had turned up. “Good news,” he said.

“We only have to worry about twenty families.”

That is the only advantage I know of being underpopulated. For a moment, I considered not issuing a general alert. After all, for all we knew, there was only one kangaroo rex and it was in our backyard.

Mike read my mind and shook his head. “If you want to keep them, Annie, you better not risk having one of them eat some kid.”

“It was only an idle thought,” I told him. “Put out a notification. Keep the kids in, keep the adults armed. But add that I don’t want them shot unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Chie-Hoon said, “Annie, we’re not going to go through this again, are we?”

“Damn straight, we are,” I said, “and this time I intend to win! Who’s coming with me?”

“Me,” said Leo.

“And me,” said Susan, looking up from her monitor. “It z’s the same kangaroo rex as last time, Mama Jason, only I’ve got two secondary helices here. They’re both marsupial, but more than that I can’t tell you offhand. It’ll take the computer all night to search.”

“Let me have a look first,” Chie-Hoon said. “Maybe I’ll recognize something. I have a vested interested in marsupials, after all.”

Everybody’s got to have a hobby. Chie-Hoon’s is the Australian Guild, meaning Chie-Hoon knows more than anybody could ever want to about the customs and wildlife of Earth’s “Australia,” which includes about ninety percent of the marsupials found in ships’

records.

“Help yourself,” I said. I’d never found the time to join any of the Earth-authentic Guilds myself—if I were looking for a hobby I rather thought I’d make it Leo—but this was the sort of thing that came in handy. “Since Leo volunteers to come along, we’ll leave you to it.”

Since I’d worked with Leo 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
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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 had 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, I 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 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 guidelines 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 eye 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 granddad. 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 seen 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
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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,”