“You’re going to make off with half my kids one of these days.”
I couldn’t help it. I jerked around to stare at her. She was smiling—and that laugh was threatening to break out all over again. “Annie, surely it’s occurred to you that half those kids want to be just like you when they grow up!”
“But—!”
“Oh, dear. Poor Mama Jason. You thought I was raising a whole passel of little Ellies here, didn’t you?”
The thing was, I’d never given it any thought at all. More than likely I just assumed Susan and Chris and Ilanith would take over the lodge and …
Elly patted my hand. “Don’t you worry. Chris will run the lodge and you and the rest can still drop by for vacations.”
I felt guilty as hell somehow, as if I’d subverted the whole family.
Elly gave me a big hug. “Wipe that look off your face. You’d think I got chimerae instead of proper kids! The only thing I ask is that you don’t cart them off until you’re sure they’re ready.”
“You’ll worry yourself sick!”
“No. I’ll worry the same way I worry about you. Do I look sick?”
She stood off and let me look. She looked about as good as anybody could. She knew it, too. Just grinned again and said, “Take Leo with you. Susan, too, if you think she’s ready. I warn you, she thinks she is, but she’ll listen to you on the subject.”
And that was the end of it as far as Elly was concerned. I walked back to my room, thoughtful all the way.
Damnify knew how I could have missed it. And there I’d been aggravating the situation as well, calling Susan “my assistant,” letting her do the gene-read on Leo’s pansies. Then I thought about it some more.
She’d done a damn fine gene-read. If she’d heard Leo talk about the pansies, she’d have no doubt thought to try that second as well.
The more I thought, the more I saw Elly was right. It was just so unexpected that I’d never really looked at it.
I crawled into that comfortable bed and lay there listening to the night sounds off the loch and all the while I was wondering how soon I could put Susan to work. I drifted off into sleep and my dreams were more pleased by it all than I would have admitted to Elly.
I woke, not rested enough, to an insistent shaking of my shoulder and opened my eyes to see a goggle-eyed something inches from my face. Thinking the dream had turned bad, I mumbled at it to go away and rolled over.
“Please, Mama Jason,” the bad dream said. “Please, I gotta talk to you. I can’t tell Elly, and I’m afraid it’s gonna hurt her.”
Well, when a bad dream starts threatening Elly, I listen. I sat up and discovered that the bad dream was only Jen, the nine-year-old. “Gimme half a chance, Jen,” I said, holding up one hand while I smeared my face around with the other, trying to stretch my eyes into focus so I could see my watch. My watch told me I’d had enough sleep to function rationally, so I levered myself up.
Jen’s eyes unpopped, squinched up, and started leaking enormous teardrops. She made a dash for the door, but by then I was awake and I caught her before she made her exit. “Hold on,” I said. “You don’t just tell me something’s out to hurt Elly and then disappear. Ain’t done.”
Still leaking tears, she wailed, “It’s supposed to be a secret.…”
Which she wanted somebody to force out of her. Okay, I could oblige, and she could tell the rest Mama Jason made her tell. I plopped her firmly on the edge of the bed. “Now wipe your nose and tell me what this is about. You’d think I was the chimera the way you’re acting.”
“You gotta promise not to hurt Monster. He’s Susan’s.”
I did nothing of the sort. I waited and she went on, “I didn’t know he was so big, Mama Jason!” She threw out those two skinny arms to show me just how big, which actually made it about three feet long tops, but I knew from the fingertip to fingertip glance that went with the arm fling that she meant much bigger. “Now I’m scared for Susan!”
“What do you mean, he’s Susan’s?”
“Susan sneaks out at night to feed him. I never saw him, but he must be awful. She calls him Monster and he gurgles.” She shivered.
I gathered her up and held her until the shivering stopped. Obviously all this had been going on for some time. She’d only broken silence because of Stirzaker’s panicky report. “Okay,” I said, still patting her, “I want you to let me know the next time Susan sneaks out to feed this Monster of hers—”
She blinked at me solemnly. “She’s out there now, Mama Jason.”
“Okay,” I said. “Out there where?”
The bellow off the loch cut me short and brought me to my feet. Unlike Leo, I knew that hadn’t been part of a dream. I was already headed for the window when the sound came again. I peered into the night.
Mirabile doesn’t have a moon, but for the moment we’ve got a decent nova. Not enough radiation to worry about, just enough to see glimmers in the dark.
Something huge rippled through the waters of the loch. I stared harder, trying to make it come clear, but it wouldn’t. It bellowed again, and an answering bellow came from the distant shore.
Whatever it was, it was huge, even bigger than the drifted otters I’d seen earlier. Had they chained up to something already? There was a splash and another bellow. I remember thinking Elly wouldn’t hear it from her room; she was on the downside of the slope, cushioned from the loch noises by the earth of the slope itself.
Then I got a second glimpse of it, a huge head, a long body. With a shock, I realized that it looked like nothing so much as those blurry flat photos of “Nessie.”
I turned to throw on some clothes and ran right into Jen, scaring her half to death. “Easy, easy. It’s just me,” I said, holding her by the shoulders. “Run get Leo—and tell him to bring his rifle.” I gave her a push for the door and that kid moved like a house-afire.
So did Leo. By the time I’d got my gear together, double-checking the flare gun to make sure it had a healthy charge left, he was on my doorstep, rifle in hand.
We ran down the steps together, pausing only once—to ask Jen which way Susan had gone. Jen said, “Down to the loch, she calls it your favorite place! I thought you’d know!” She was on the verge of another wail.
“I know,” I said. “Now you wait here. If we’re not back in two hours, you wake Elly and tell her to get on the phone to Mike.”
“Mike,” she repeated, “Mike. Two hours.” She plopped herself down on the floor directly opposite the clock. I knew I could count on her.
Leo and I switched on flashlights and started into the woods. I let him lead for the time being—he knew the paths better than I did and I wanted to move as fast as possible. We made no attempt to be quiet at it, either. In the dark and short-handed, I’ve always preferred scaring the creature off to facing it down.
We got to the boats in record time. Sure enough, one of them was gone. Leo and I pushed off and splashed across the loch, Leo rowing, me with the rifle in one hand and the flare gun in the other.
Nine times out of ten, the flare gun is enough to turn a Dragon’s Tooth around and head it away from you. The rifle’s there for that tenth time. Or in case it was threatening Susan.
A couple of large things rushed noisily through the woods to our far right. They might have been stag. They might not have been. Neither Leo nor I got a look at them.
“Duck,” said Leo and I did and missed being clobbered by one of those overhanging branches by about a quarter of an inch. Turning, I made out the boat Susan had used. There was just enough proper shore there that we could beach ours beside it.
“All right, Susan,” I said into the shadows. “Enough is enough. Come on out. At my age, I need my beauty sleep.”
Leo snorted.
There was a quiet crackle behind him and Susan crawled out from the undergrowth looking sheepish. “I only wanted it to be a surprise,” she said. She looked all around her and brightened. “It still is—you’ve scared them off!”
“When you’re as old and cranky as I am, there’s nothing you like less than a surprise,” I said.
“Oh.” She raked twigs out of her hair. “Then if I can get them to come out again, would you take your birthday present a month early?”
Leo and I glanced at each other. I knew we were both thinking about Jen, sitting in the hallway, worrying. “Two hours and not a minute more,” Leo said.
“Okay, Susan. See if you can get ‘em out. I’ll want a cell sample, too.” I rummaged through my gear for the snagger. Nice little gadget, that. Like an arrow on a string. Fire it off without a sound, it snaps at the critter with less than a fly sting (I know, I had Mike try it on me when he jury-rigged the first one), and you pull back the string with a sample on the end of it.
“Sit down then and be quiet.”
We did. Susan ducked into the undergrowth a second time and came out with half a loaf of Chris’s bread. She made the same chucking noise I’d heard her use to call her otters. She was expecting something low to the ground, I realized. Not the enormous thing I’d seen swimming in the loch.
I heard no more sounds from that direction, to my relief. I wish I could have thought I’d dreamed the entire thing but I knew I hadn’t. What’s worse, I picked that time to remember that one of the Nessie theories had made her out a displaced plesiosaur.
I was about to call a halt and get us all the hell out of there till daylight and a full team, when something stirred in the bushes. Susan chucked at it and held out a bit of bread.
It poked its nose into the circle of light from our flashes and blinked at us. It was the saddest-looking excuse for a creature I’d ever seen—the head was the shape of an old boot with jackass ears stuck on it.
“C’mon, Monster,” Susan coaxed. “You know how much you love Chris’s bread. Don’t worry about them. They’re noisy but they won’t hurt you.”
Sure enough, it humped its way out. It looked even worse when you saw the whole of it. What I’d thought was an otter wasn’t. Oh, the body was otter, all six feet of it, but the head didn’t go with the rest. After a moment’s hesitation, it made an uncertain lowing noise, then snuffled at Susan, and took the piece of bread in its otter paws and crammed it down its mouth.
Then it bellowed, startling all three of us.
“He just learned how to do that this year,” Susan said, a pleased sort of admiration in her voice. The undergrowth around us stirred.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leo level his rifle. Susan looked at him, worried. “He won’t shoot unless something goes wrong, kiddo,” I said as softly as I could and still be heard. “He promised me.”
Susan nodded. “Okay, Monster. You can call them out then.”
She needn’t have said it. That bellow already had. There were maybe a dozen of them, all alike, all of them painfully ugly. No, that’s the wrong way to put it—they were all laughably ugly.
The one she’d dubbed “Monster” edged closer to me. Nosy like the otters, too. It whuffled at my hand. Damn if that head wasn’t purely herbivore. The teeth could give you a nasty nip from the looks of them, but it was deer family. The ugly branch of it anyhow.
A second one crawled into Leo’s lap. It was trying to make off with his belt buckle. Susan chucked at it and bribed it away with bread. “She’s such a thief. If you’re not careful, she’ll take anything that’s shiny. Like the otters, really.”
Yes, they were. The behavior was the same I’d seen from Susan’s otters—but now I understood why the otters had chased one of these away this afternoon. They were recognizably not otters, even if they thought they were. Like humans, otters are very conservative about what they consider one of them.
Pretty soon the bread was gone. Monster hustled up the troops and headed them out, with one last look over his shoulder at us.
I popped him neatly with the snagger before Susan could raise a protest. He grunted and gnawed for a moment at his hip, the way a dog would for a flea, then he spotted the snagger moving away from him and pounced.
I had a tug of war on my hands. Susan got into the act and so did a handful of Monster’s fellow monsters.
Leo laughed. It was enough to startle them away. I fell over and Susan landed on top of me. She was giggling, too, but she crawled over and got up, triumphant, with the sample in her hands.
“You didn’t need it, Mama Jason,” Susan said, “but I’ve decided to forgive you. Monster thought it was a good game.” She giggled again and added impishly, “So did I.”
“Fine,” I said. “I hate to spoil the party, but it’s time we got back to the lodge. We’re all going to feel like hell in the morning.”
Susan yawned. “I spose so. They lose interest pretty fast once I run out of bread.”
“Susan, you row Leo back.”
“You’re not coming?” she said.
“Two boats,” I pointed out Susan was sleepy enough that she didn’t ask why I wanted Leo in her boat. Leo blinked at me once, caught on, and climbed into the boat with his rifle across his knees.
By the time we reached the lodge, we were all pretty well knocked out. Jen gave us a big grin of relief to welcome us in. But two steps later we ran hard into Elly’s scowl, not to mention Chris’s, Ilanith’s, and a half dozen others.
“I found Jen sitting in the hall watching the clock,” Elly said. “She wouldn’t go to bed and she wouldn’t say why. Once I counted noses, I discovered the three of you were missing. So you—” that was me, of course “—owe me the explanation you wouldn’t let her give me.”
“There’s something in the loch,” I said. “We got a sample and I’ll check it out tomorrow. Right now, we all need some sleep.”
“Liar,” said Chris. “Who’s hungry? Midnight snacks—” she glanced at the clock and corrected “—whatever, food’s waiting.”
Everybody obligingly trooped into the kitchen, lured by the smell of chowder. I followed, knowing this meant I wasn’t going to get off the hook without a full explanation. That meant no way of covering Susan’s tracks.
We settled down and dived ravenously into the chowder. Chris poured a box of crackers into a serving tray. “There’s no bread,” she said with finality, eying Susan to let us all know who was responsible for this woeful state of affairs.
Susan squirmed. “Next time I’ll take them crackers. They like your bread better, though.”
“If you’d asked,” Chris said, “I’d have made a couple of extra loaves.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise for Mama Jason.” She looked around the table. “You know how hard it is to think up a birthday present for her!” She pushed away from the table. “Wait! I’ll be right back. I’ll show you!”
I concentrated on the chowder. Birthday present, indeed! As if I needed some present other than the fact of those kids themselves. If Susan hadn’t opened her mouth, Elly would’ve assumed I’d taken her along with us, as Elly’d suggested earlier. Glancing up, I saw Elly rest a sympathetic eye on me.
Well, I was off the hook, but Susan sure as hell wasn’t.
There was a clamor of footsteps on the stairs and Susan was back with a huge box, full to over-spilling with papers and computer tapes. Chris shoved aside the pot of chowder to make space for them.
Susan pulled out her pocket computer and plugged it into the wall modem. “I did it right, Mama Jason. See if I didn’t.”
The photo album wasn’t regulation but as the first page was a very pretty hologram (I recognized Ilanith’s work) that spelled out “Happy Birthday, Mama Jason!” in imitation fireworks I could hardly complain. The second page was a holo of a mother otter and her pups. The pup in the foreground was deformed—the same way the creatures Susan had fed Chris’s bread to were.
“That’s Monster,” Susan said, thrusting a finger at the holo. She peeled a strip of tape from beneath the holo and fed it to the computer. “That’s his gene-read.” She glanced at Chris. “I lured his mother away with bread to get the cell sample. The otters love your bread, t
oo. I never used the fresh bread, Chris, only the stale stuff.”
Chris nodded. “I know. I thought it was all going to the otters, though.”
“More like ‘odders,’” Leo put in, grinning. “Two dees.”
Susan giggled. “I like that. Let’s call ‘em Odders, Mama Jason.”
“Your critters,” I said. “Naming it’s your privilege.”
“Odders is right.” Chris peered over my shoulder and said to Susan, “Why were you feeding Dragon’s Teeth?”
“He’s so ugly, he’s cute. The first ones got abandoned by their mothers. She—” Susan tapped the holo again “—decided to keep hers. Got ostracized for it, too, Mama Jason.”
I nodded absently. That happened often enough. I was well into the gene-read Susan had done on her Monster. It was a good, thorough piece of work. I couldn’t have done better myself.
Purely herbivorous—and among the things you could guarantee it’d eat were waterlilies and clogweed. That stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked up. “It eats clogweed!”
Susan dimpled. “It loves it! That’s why it likes Chris’s bread better than crackers.”
“Why you—” Chris, utterly outraged, stood up so suddenly Elly had to catch at her bowl to keep from slopping chowder on everything.
I laughed. “Down, Chris! She’s not insulting your bread! You use brandy-flour in it—and brandyflour has almost the identical nutrients in it that clogweed has.”
“You mean I could use clogweed to make my bread?” The idea appealed to Chris. She sat down again and looked at Susan with full attention.
“No, you can’t,” Susan said. “It’s got a lot of things in it humans can’t eat.”
Leo said, “I’m not following again. Susan—?”
“Simple, Noisy. Clogweed’s a major nuisance. Mostly it’s taken care of by sheer heavy labor. Around Torville, everybody goes down to the canals and the irrigation ditches once a month or so and pulls the clogweed out by hand. When I saw Monster would eat clogweed, I figured he’d be worth keeping—if we could, that is.”
“Not bad,” said Ilanith. “I wondered why the intake valves had been so easy to clean lately.” She leaned over to look at Monster’s holo. “Two years old now, right?”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Page 72
