Buffalito Bundle

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Gregor snorted. “Amazing Conroy,” he said. “Hypnotist, courier, and now blackmailer.”

  “No one’s being blackmailed,” I said. “I’m offering Mr. Andrews a risk free deal, one where he comes out ahead, and saves his consortium millions upon millions of credits. We can both win here, Andrews.”

  He studied the compadd. “What is this ‘signing bonus’ at the bottom here? Why should I give you five million credits, and why right now?”

  He was hooked. I can read people. Andrews just needed a little handling to close the deal. I put on my best ‘aw shucks’ look, sighed loudly, and gave a guilty glance over toward Gregor. “I have a few debts of my own that I need to clear up before I can begin supplying Wada with its half price buffalitos.”

  This time it was Andrews who snorted. “I don’t care about your problems, Mr. Conroy, why should I help you solve them?”

  “Your stated purpose in coming here was to make a trade. We’ve done that, and more. It’s not quite as lucrative as what you were hoping, but it still gives you a tremendous edge over your competition.”

  Andrews just stood there, silent for several more moments, then pressed his thumbprint onto the compadd and signed it. When he looked up, he met my eyes for just an instant and tossed me the compadd. Then he turned and climbed the stairs, leaving without another word, and taking Carla Espinoza with him. His thugs quickly followed. I held the compadd lovingly in one hand. Somewhere, five million credits had just transferred from a Wada bank account to mine. For a moment.

  Gregor rose to his feet and staggered toward me with murder in his eye. Reggie, still tucked under my arm, began to growl.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m going to transfer this five million to you, here and now. That’s more than twice the price you put on the insult to your sister, and it settles any debt, real or imagined between us.”

  Gregor shook his head. “Is only money, Conroy. I can always get money, but where else can I get pleasure of hurting you?”

  I took a step back and felt the vault door against my back. “I thought this was supposed to be about your sister’s honor? If you maim me for your own satisfaction, you do her a greater insult than anything you claim I did.”

  He stopped. And the murderous gleam faded from his eyes. Then he smiled. “Tell me, Conroy, are you afraid of me? Afraid of consequences of insulting my sister?”

  I nodded. “More than I’ve ever been afraid of anything in my life.”

  He reached out one thick hand and lightly slapped my cheek. “That will do then. That, and your money. Now.”

  Betsy hurried over with another compadd. “Your thumb here, Mr. Conroy,” she said and held it for me to mark before offering it to Gregor.

  He took it, confirmed the transfer of five million credits, and slipped it into the pocket of his immaculate suit. He turned to stare at the exit for a long moment. “This Andrews man,” he said, “he needs to be afraid too. I think maybe I am visiting his dreams soon. Several times.” Without another word he walked up the stairs, leaving his cleavers on the floor, and the basement foyer empty again except for Betsy Penrose and Reggie and me.

  I waited until Mandelbrot’s security screens assured me they’d cleared the building. Then I turned to Betsy to thank her again. She had sat down and closed her eyes. A tremor ran through her. When she opened her eyes and looked up at me I asked the only question that made any sense.

  “So, who are you now?”

  “I’m Lisa,” she said. “Can I see your buffalo dog, Mr. Conroy? Betsy told me what Andrews said, and I think I know what the problem is.”

  I handed Reggie over, though he whined pitifully as she took him from my arms.

  “Is he sick? I’ve never heard of a buffalo dog that wouldn’t eat. He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

  She poked and prodded him a few times, checked his eyes and squeezed his nose in such a way that made him bleat and stick out his tongue for her inspection.

  “Well? Is he okay?”

  She set Reggie on the ground and he immediately trotted over to me, hooves clicking delicately on the linoleum. I scooped him up and was rewarded with several licks from his raspy tongue.

  “He’s fine, Mr. Conroy. Perfectly healthy.”

  “Then why did Andrews say he was defective?”

  “I suspect he was comparing him to the many other buffalo dogs at Wada Consortium. But yours is very different.”

  “Different? Carla was the one that was different. I picked Reggie more or less at random out of one of the pens on Gibrahl.”

  “It wasn’t what happened on Gibrahl that made him different. It’s what happened while you were en route to Earth,” she said.

  “Oh. . . You mean he’s different because he impregnated Carla?”

  “Not quite. That’s a necessary but not sufficient piece. I told you before, that impregnation for the female is a one-time event. For the male, it’s an opportunity to create a community for the protection of all newborn pups. Male buffalo dogs bond socially with all other males in their pack when they impregnate a female. They become leaders and protectors at that time, responsible for the well being of the pack.”

  I shook my head, “I still don’t understand.”

  “None of the buffalo dogs that the Arconi sell have been through that experience. None of them are protectors. Yours is.”

  “So when Reggie mixed with the other buffalitos at the Wada Consortium, they deferred to him?”

  “In all things. But there’s another piece. He didn’t have any other buffalo dogs around to bond with after he impregnated Carla. And in pack culture that’s just unknown. So, my guess is, he bonded with you. For lack of a better term, he ‘imprinted’ on you. And he wouldn’t eat for Wada because—”

  “Because I wasn’t there to feed him by hand like I’d done every day on the trip here.” I shifted Reggie around until I was holding him with both hands and lifted him up so I could look him in the face at eye level. “So I’m stuck with you, is that it?”

  Reggie replied with a short bark and a flatulent toot from the other end. Which reminded me; buffalo dogs fart oxygen, lots of it.

  “First thing we need to do is hire an engineer,” I said.

  Dr. Penrose cocked her head and then nodded. “We’re going to need to vent the extra oxygen, or risk explosions. I think Bess knows someone who can do the job discreetly.”

  “Good. One question, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “When I hired you, did I hire your ‘sisters’ too?”

  “We sort of go together. Package deal.”

  “Did the Wada Consortium know that?”

  She smiled. “They’re large enough, with a big enough bureaucracy, that no one ever worked it out. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll come up with a fair salary and benefits package for all of us. You strike me as that kind of boss.”

  I winced. Boss. That was going to take some getting used to. But then, so would being the only supplier of buffalo dogs in Human Space, to say nothing of being filthy rich. I had a room just a few steps away containing millions of credits in breeding stock, with plenty more soon enough.

  I walked to the vault, pounded out the code that Mandelbrot and I had agreed on, and then unlocked the door. Dr. Penrose helped me pull it open.

  “C’mon, Reggie,” I said, “time for you to meet your kids.”

  A Buffalito Of Mars

  This is the first story I sold to Eric T. Reynolds, the publisher behind Hadley Rille Books. It was for one of his first anthologies, Visual Journeys, and the premise required authors to write a story inspired by a brilliant piece of space art. I was working from a painting by Michael Carroll that evoked Martian terraforming. It seemed like a natural avenue for Conroy's buffalo dogs, and I wanted to throw in a small homage to Burroughs' Barsoom (something that I do more blatantly in the novella “Barry's Tale” as well as in my novel Buffalito Contingency). Except, I was coming up short. I had all the pieces, but they just
wouldn't fit together for me. I happened to be visiting my mother in Arizona the weekend the story was due, and I phoned Eric to tell him I wasn't going to meet the deadline, something I'd never had to tell an editor before. In response, he asked if another week would make a difference, because he was already waiting on stories from a few other people. At that moment I didn't know if I could finish the story in a week or a month or a year, but naturally I said “yes!” The next morning, after a lovely breakfast with my mother, my wife and I drove away on a side trip to Sedona, a little touristy area that in addition to restaurants and shops featured lots of empty desert and red, red rock. Walking around that barren landscape put me in mind of Mars, and all the pieces fell into place. Late that night, after we'd returned to my mother's home, I finished the first draft of this story. It's still one of my favorites.

  It turns out, we weren’t the first on Mars. Six months ago while Seroni was extending the borders of its city-state to include a fifty kilometer canyon of prime Martian real estate, a construction crew stumbled over the remains of an alien artifact at least several million years old.

  The Seroni governing board brought in Faith Sands, a renowned archeologist, to establish and supervise the dig site, but they didn’t stop their expansion. The population of Mars was booming, and the slow work of rendering its atmosphere habitable had begun. Eight leased buffalo dogs were already chewing enormous tunnels into the Martian rock, faster and cheaper than conventional equipment could manage. As they ate their way through tons of red stone they filled the resulting spaces with vast amounts of freshly farted oxygen. Buffalitos are good for things like that; they look like adorable, miniature bison, but they’re natural terraformers.

  With the proper schooling, they’re also good for delicate bits of excavation. That same talent for eating any solid matter can be combined with discrimination training to allow them to eat away rock or muck or whatever other substance is covering up precious artifacts, leaving the good stuff behind and untouched, save for a glistening bit of buffalo dog saliva.

  My company, Buffalogic, Inc., had leased four of our specially trained buffalitos to Dr. Sands for her excavation. The eight animals eating shafts into the canyon’s walls had come from the Wada Consortium, our chief rivals. That’s how the problems started; that’s what brought me to Mars.

  Dr. Sands stood across the table from me, both palms flat upon its glossy ceramo surface which projected an aerial view of the dig site. A white circle stood out amidst the surrounding red rock. Even at this resolution I could see complex patterns of squiggles and lines and arcs etched in the white, except where tiny spots of fluorescent yellow ran back and forth, like trails of glowing breadcrumbs. And every bit of yellow indicated a spot where the markings had been scraped clean.

  “Hoof prints, Mr. Conroy, buffalito hoof prints. Buffalo dogs have been trampling through my site and causing irreparable damage to the sole artifact that’s here. They’ve crippled this project, eradicated nearly ten percent of the glyphs on the capstone.” She spoke Traveler, the adopted language of Mars, but with a Caribbean accent that had first shaped words in Papiamento, a very different creole. That accent, despite the crisp fury behind her words, made me think of cool, clear waters and warm Aruban nights. Her fist banged down on the table and shook me from my reverie. She tossed a sealed bag at me, full of white chips and flakes of an unknown compound that been waiting to tell us a story for millions of years. “Damn it, Conroy, for all I know they’ve rendered the rest of it untranslatable! What are you going to do about it?”

  “There’s some mistake, Dr. Sands,” I said. “My buffalo dogs’ handlers would never allow their charges to run through your dig like this.” I looked down at Reggie, my personal buffalito, the sire who had allowed me to start my company in the first place. He lay curled up on my lap, blissfully asleep.

  Keeping my eyes on Reggie was safer than looking at the archeologist. She was attractive, sure, but that wasn’t what distracted me. Despite her anger, she radiated a kind of purposeful harmony I’d only experienced in the presence of a handful of nuns. And she possessed an intensity of curiosity I’d never seen outside of a group of kindergarteners on a field trip. The combination smote me; I’d do anything I could to help her, over and above what I’d do for an ordinary customer. It wouldn’t do for me to reveal that though. Far better to pretend a deep fascination with Reggie’s ears.

  “No, of course not, the prints aren’t from your animals,” she said, oblivious to my infatuation. “Yours are perfectly behaved, and besides they’re all wearing booties. No, it’s the other buffalo dogs that are causing the trouble, the ones being used by the government’s construction crews.”

  I spread my hands wide, careful not to come near any of the dotted yellow trails. “Then why bring the problem to me? Seroni didn’t lease those buffalitos from me.”

  “They’re from Wada, and before you tell me to talk to them, I already have. They say it’s your fault.”

  “How is it my company’s fault?”

  “Not your company, just you. Mr. Ahonen, the Wada representative specifically named you. He insists you’ve tainted your animals, pheromones or something, which cause his animals to escape their pens and come here, trampling my dig in the process. What do you have to say about that?”

  I shrugged. “Only that this Ahonen person needs to get better pens, or better handlers.”

  “So you don’t deny this talk about pheromones? Are the buffalo dogs you’ve leased me in heat or something? Is that what’s going on?”

  I looked up and met her gaze. It was like sunlight on my face. “Dr. Sands, I honestly don’t know what’s going on. Buffalitos don’t go into heat, not in the common sense. Further, the females in the team you leased have already had their single litter of pups and are now completely sterile.”

  “Then what—”

  I cut her off. “Give me a few hours. Let me talk to my experts back on Earth. Meantime, set up a meeting for me with that fellow handling the Wada buffalitos. One way or another, I promise I’ll resolve this and there’ll be no more interference from their buffalo dogs.”

  “You’re going to have ongoing interference,” said Lisa Penrose. Despite being back on Earth in our corporate office, she was only an ansible call away. Mind you, the ansible was in my shuttle, and it took me two hours to climb my way out of the canyon and reach the ledge where I’d parked. The lesser Martian gravity made the climb easier, but the cumbersome environment suit required by the low pressure and unbreathable atmosphere made it something of a wash.

  Lisa knew more about buffalo dogs than any other person in human space. She was the real brains behind Buffalogic, Inc., and I’d learned never to doubt her assessments. That didn’t mean I understood them. Before I could find a way around the facts, I needed to know what they were.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Mr. Conroy, there’s a reason I always advise against taking on work near another company’s buffalo dogs. And you showing up likely made things worse.”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything.”

  “You brought Reggie with you.”

  “Of course I did. I wasn’t going to leave him behind.”

  She sighed at me over the ansible. “He’s a pack leader. You’ve seen the effect he has on our own buffalitos; when he’s around they stop whatever they’re doing to defer to him and mimic his behaviors. That’s part of why we can train ours to perform more demanding tasks. But Wada’s animals have never been exposed to a pack leader, or even another buffalo dog who’s seen a pack leader. That information is being communicated between their animals and ours.”

  “Because buffalo dogs are herd animals?” I asked.

  “Hierarchical herd animals. And because ours have direct experience of Reggie, they’re higher up in the hierarchy. The Wada buffalitos want to know what ours know, and they probably want to join up.”

  “Oh yeah, that’ll go over well,” I said, imagining explaining to an industrial magistrate how the most
valuable assets of a rival company just happened to follow me home one day. “Is there any way to turn this off? They’re threatening the very existence of the archaeological site.

  Back on Earth, Lisa Penrose shook her head. “Nope. Nothing short of locking them up. And since they can eat through physical constraints even that won’t work.”

  “Huh. Well, maybe if I talk to this Ahonen fellow I can work out a compromise.”

  “There’s nothing to work out, Mr. Conroy,” said the representative from Wada when I went to see him the next day. We met in his pressurized command bungalow less than a kilometer from the archeological site. “I don’t know what you’ve done to your buffalo dogs, but you can’t blame mine for being curious about them.”

  Ahonen was a tall man, blonde and blue eyed, and I recognized him at once. We’d met a year before when Dr. Penrose and I had visited his native Turku to do favor for the King of Finland. Ahonen had approached us for a job, but he’d washed out of the training program after kicking a buffalito.

  “Can you at least corral them with sonic fencing?”

  “I didn’t bring any. Why would I? I’ve got tracking chips in their collars, it’s not like they’re going to get lost. If they stray too far, I send one of the boys to bring them back.”

  “They’re straying into the dig site!”

  “Like I said, that’s not my problem.”

  And that’s your final word?” I asked.

  “Have a good day, Mr. Conroy,” said Ahonen.

  We both stood, and he walked me to the airlock of the bungalow. I put on my environment suit and stepped outside. Buffalo dogs could tolerate the pressure and atmosphere of Mars, even if humans couldn’t yet. Reggie waited for me, sitting right where I’d told him to ‘stay’. I’d said it in front of one of Ahonen’s unpenned buffalitos, just before I’d gone inside. Three of them sat there now, right alongside Reggie. I scooped him up and climbed into the little buggy I’d borrowed from Dr. Sands.