An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  The floor creaked a little as she grabbed for the ball, and she realized she stood on a trap door. “I see we’ve found the crawlspace, dear doggie.” She tossed the ball over her shoulder and wiggled the latch. The crawlspace was probably only an access point for the pipes and floor joists, but curiosity still called.

  She shoved the bed farther out from the wall and dropped to her knees beside the trapdoor. It opened easily.

  It was a shallow crawlspace, maybe a meter deep. Peering into the opening, Standish could make out pipes silhouetted in the dim light coming from above and from the screened vents dotting the walls. Just beyond the square of light cast by the open trapdoor, a sturdy rectangle sat, the size and shape of a storage box.

  Standish caught the handle on the lid with her fingertips and pulled it closer. It was the same dull green plastic as the ones in her office, and not particularly heavy. She pulled it up and then carried it into the middle of the room, near the couch.

  The box sat there, dusty and sullen. She ought to call Peter Bajowski and let him know she’d found some of Chambers’ stuff.

  She picked up her hand unit and then put it down. The box had to have come from the office, which meant it wasn’t Chambers’ personal property. It was her responsibility. Standish carried it across the room to the coffee table. She took a beer out of the refrigerator and sat down cross-legged in front of the thing.

  Hattie sniffed the box and sneezed. On Earth, the air in Standish’s apartment had been triple filtered, keeping out pollens and molds and most viruses. The dog probably hadn’t smelled dust since she’d been a puppy. But the box couldn’t have been under the house too long — it was only a fine layer of dust. Standish put down her beer and removed the box’s lid.

  “A map?” She picked up a folded rectangle. She recognized the typeface and heavy paper stock; this was the same stuff the Songheuser survey crews used. She opened it and spread it across the bin. Green filled the entire sheet, suggesting a heavily forested area. She found the label on the top left corner: Sector 13.

  She’d just marked this map down as missing this afternoon, and here it was, stashed under her house like treasure. She could understand Duncan leaving the map in his UTV or losing it in the field — from the gaps in the map files, she’d guessed that happened to him quite a bit — but hiding it under his house? She refolded the map and set it aside.

  She picked up the next item, a thick file folder, legal-style, with long brass brads to keep everything in place. There was no label in the plastic tab on the side. After a gulp of her beer, she flipped through the right-hand stack. Bills of lading, she guessed. Carbon copies of invoices, creased and stained. She had thought carbon copies died out two hundred years ago.

  Standish smoothed out one of the invoices and tried to read the smudged text. It looked like the shipper was a warehouse out of Earth. Scanning the prices running down the page, she found the shipping total and frowned. Zero. How the hell did someone ship this much crap all the way from Earth for free? Even email had a surcharge this far from home.

  She flipped backward a few pages, looking for some sign of a credit or an overpayment, anything that would explain the reduced shipping fee. Nothing. Just free shipping on every page.

  Standish put down the file. She couldn’t see any connection between the file and the map of Sector 13, an unprepossessing rectangle of untouched forest. Everything else in the box looked like junk: a letter from someone who worked for the Port of Space City, full of statistics about the power of their wireless repeater. A note from Peter, written in a scrawl she could barely read. In the corner, the sketch of some kind of native life form stood out, the parts of the little plant (fungus?) carefully labeled in his illegible hand.

  At the bottom of it all was a book. The thin volume looked ancient, the cover water-stained and bent. The dank stink of mildew rose off it. It was an entirely Earth-y smell, and Standish wondered if Peter’s neuroses about contaminating Huginn with their Earth spores and bacteria was a little more spot-on than she’d originally given him credit for.

  She opened the book cautiously. It felt like it could crumble in her hands.

  “April 23rd,” she read out loud. “Last month’s Prayer Breakfast brought in the final thousand dollars we needed.” She looked over at the dog, watching with her head laid on her paws. “Hattie, this is someone’s diary,” she explained. “And it’s sure as hell not Duncan Chambers’.”

  She turned back to the front, but it had not been personalized. The handwriting was clear and simple, the printing of someone with either the drive to be read or a naturally forthright disposition. Given the “Prayer Breakfast” reference, it was probably the latter — maybe one of those first Believers of the Word Made Flesh colonists.

  Standish thought about putting the book back in the box with the map and the other oddments, but something made her set it on the couch behind her. She put the lid on the box and then slid the strange thing under her bed. She’d take another look at it all later. At least she’d found one of the maps on her list of missing or misfiled papers.

  She sipped at her beer. But why had Duncan taken the map of Sector 13? Of all the sections of Canaan Lake’s surveyed lands, it had to be one of the most boring. Maybe she’d take one of the utility vehicles and check it out tomorrow. She ought to get a sense of which sections already had power and communications lines going through them. After all, it sounded like Songheuser’s major priority for the area was getting everything ready for new development.

  Which meant laying a whole lot of new cable — and since she was the only member of the communications department, she was going to be busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. She drained her beer bottle and went to the refrigerator for another.

  HUGINN, Day 2

  Yesterday, the shuttle let us down on the shore of Canaan Lake, where the beach is wide and smooth, made up of round, flat stones like slices of bread. They clack when you walk across them, and I can hear the youngest of us, ten year-old Elka Morris and her cousin Noah, out there playing even as I write this in the makeshift cabin we’ve set up as the kitchen.

  The little ones play for now, but soon they will be working as hard as the rest of us. We’ll break ground on the first field tomorrow. We can’t afford to wait.

  We spent all night taking stock of our supplies. It took hours. Each of the shipping containers the shuttle left on the shore stands taller than my head and deeper than my mother’s house. We had to bring a great deal of Earthly things with us, because we need soil amendments and helpful bacteria to help our seeds grow in this strange ground. We don’t know yet if our livestock, now mostly frozen embryos, will be able to eat any of the plants that grow here on Huginn. The company’s survey teams noted a small handful of mushrooms and lichens that have promise as food for both men and beasts, but there’s no way to know how commonly available these things will be in our particular region.

  To our great dismay, this morning we discovered we are short several shipping containers. We have our seeds, supplies, and everything we need for running the cryogenics set-up, but half our winter food stores are missing. To make things worse, the temperature is far lower than projected. The cold and damp clings to me even beside this propane stove.

  Matthias has put me in charge of medicines and what remains of our food stores. At least all the propane made it, so I can keep up with the demand for hot water. Several people are mildly ill with the effects of cryo, and Vonda Morris has been vomiting non-stop. Orrin and all the Morris clan are very worried about her. I do not think it is cryo poisoning, but Doc Sounds and I haven’t ruled it out.

  It’s a good thing we have Bob Sounds with us, because we are nearly eighty kilometers from the nearest habitation, the corporate offices at the spaceport. There are plans to build a real town out there, but for now there is just a stretch of mud and four or five buildings made from freshly printed plasticboard. Our shuttle pilot pointed it out as we flew over.

  Between
the spaceport and our lake, there are just hills, each of them steeper than the last, with deep ravines cutting between them. The big trees, like massive horsetail weeds, grow on every last inch of hillside. I’ve never seen forests like this. Even on my trips to Seattle, where hundreds of acres have been converted to national park, trees do not grow so densely. We will have to fight the forest for every inch of land we need.

  In the face of all that hard work, I am going to trust in God and my companions. Doc Sounds is not the only one of us with worldly experience. Mei Lin Perkins was an engineer before she came to the church. Several others, including Matthias, took classes from outside the faith once they knew they were coming to a new world. The forty-two of us, excluding the six littles under the age of sixteen, are a sturdy and handy lot.

  Perhaps I would be more afraid if I wasn’t so certain that this is what God intended for us. Without the hand of God to guide us, we humans would not have found the wormhole connecting our own solar system to this distant one. And it feels so much like Earth here that I can nearly believe I’m home. I suppose someday my children will run on this beach feeling as safe and comfortable as any child playing in the grass on the big church farms in Ohio.

  This will be a challenge, no doubt, but we will overcome it, just as we have overcome all the challenges that stood between us and Huginn. I will add more water to tonight’s soup, and soon, we will find a way to nourish our people with food provided by our new home.

  PETER KNELT at the base of a young horsetail tree, its skin still smooth and green and tender. At this stage it could be either species of the primitive plant — the moneymaking toothpick tree, Yggdrasil Equisetum capralis, the Yggdrasil referring to the solar system the plant was a native of, or the forest giant, Y. Equisetum forestis giganteum — and he knew which one Songheuser would prefer. Capralis was easier to grow, easier to harvest, and easier to turn into strips of luxurious blond lumber.

  Peter hoped this one would grow into the forest giant. Loggers found them difficult to cut; millworkers dreaded their arrival in the timber mills. But these big-armed trees provided the major framework of Huginn’s ecosystem. Every landbound and flying creature on the planet depended on the horsetail tree for some aspect of its livelihood, but he would have loved them even if they didn’t provide food and shelter for the moon’s creatures. Their gravitas and rustling green fronds cast mystery over the entire world, and they called to him like no other life form.

  He attached a weatherproof metal tag containing an RFID chip to the trunk. He’d come back and check on the tree in a year or two to see how it had developed. He could test its cells and use DNA to establish its species, but creating an opening in the tree’s skin could cause it to absorb excess nitrogen out of the air and create an explosive gas pocket within the pressurized trunk. He didn’t care much for logging, but he didn’t want to see anyone’s face blown off, either. There were a half-dozen accidents in the woods and at the mill every year, and people didn’t always survive them.

  He’d heard about the latest explosion, this one less than a hundred kilometers away in Jawbone Flats. People were already speculating that the accident stemmed from something more insidious than just a gas pocket explosion. Workers had died. The mill was still closed two days later. A normal gas pocket event caused a quick flash bang, maybe sent some shrapnel into a couple of workers. People died in the mills sometimes, but one at a time, the product of bad luck and bad timing — they took a shard of wood through the eye, or caught a broken saw blade in the side of the head just when they took off their hard hat to adjust the band. Stupid shit happened all the time. This thing in Jawbone Flats didn’t feel like the usual stupidity.

  Peter checked the map on his hand unit. GPS confirmed this stand of trees lay along the southwestern-most edge of Sector 13. Last week, he’d marked off the whole sector into smaller quadrants, but he still didn’t feel he knew the area very well. This western side of the Canaan Lake survey area still held a lot of untouched land; much it had been zoned off for agricultural development until just a few months ago, when the Believers relented and signed over Sectors 13 and 14.

  Duncan had been opposed to that sale. But that was just Duncan, always making new friends, giving advice, butting into things. Peter put away his hand unit. It was too damn easy to think about Duncan. He missed him just as much today as he did the day Dunc had gone missing.

  Work. That’s what he needed to focus on. He had trees to study, harvest impact reports to file, and an entire new tract of forest to map.

  He set his course to follow the edge of the sector line. The sapling study required meticulous notetaking and sharp eyes. The forest canopy of dense tentacular horsetail limbs and bushy fronds of bitter-smelling needles cast a pall over the ground. While the canopy was dense and rich with still-unstudied life forms, the plants below fought for lifegiving sunshine, and a field biologist fought to see his own feet.

  Peter hunkered down next to a patch of rock-eater lichen. He rarely saw the lichen’s pink and yellow nets here in the deep forest. Horsetail trees grew in pockets of deeply digested rock fragments, soil created entirely by the hard work of lichens like these. This bunch suggested an outcropping of basalt, the stone so close to the surface that no horsetail tree could get purchase in the ground. He glanced up at the sky. A sliver of gray cloud cover peered back at him, and a raindrop landed in his eye.

  He dried his face on the back of his gloved hand and began searching the edge of this little open area. Rain be damned, he felt good about this sector. He might find a whole stand of freshly sprouted saplings here.

  Shifting to a kneeling position, he used his stylus to nudge aside strands of some unnamed greenish lichen so he could see the actual dirt below. He could concentrate more easily kneeling on a day like this. Ostensibly he was four percent lighter here on Huginn than back on Earth, but by the end of the wet season, his body felt like a waterlogged sponge.

  On the far side of the lichen patch, a deep gouge in the ground revealed the work of a trudgee — the ground scooter. The sheep-sized creatures had thick, strong digging claws on their front end, perfect for excavation. One biologist, Dr CM Yant, had studied them and believed they survived on a diet of juvenile tree scooters and subterranean mycelium.

  Peter remembered Yant’s story more for its value as a warning than for the other biologist’s results. Yant’s grant had expired and she hadn’t found a corporate sponsor for her work. Without money and a sponsor for her visa, she’d been forced off Huginn.

  No one had studied the trudgee since. As far as Peter knew, Yant was right about what it ate, but he hadn’t done much research on the topic. Songheuser didn’t pay him to study animals.

  Peter squinted at the green bits in the dirt, unsure if he was looking at uprooted saplings or something else. He took a handful of churned earth and brought it up to his nose. The tannic scent of fresh-fallen horsetail fronds had permeated the soil. With it, some kind of mineral tang caught his nose, as well as the meaty scent he associated with several species of fungi. The dirt smelled alive. He liked that. Good soil meant healthy trees and creatures.

  He hesitated. No saplings meant there was no point rooting around in the dirt. But curiosity pressed him to keep looking.

  The gouge the trudgee had dug looked shallow enough, only about ten centimeters deep, but it must have pierced a deeper pocket beneath the ground’s surface. He could see a tree scooter-sized tunnel running beneath the opened earth, the top ripped off by the trudgee’s digging. The original exit was camouflaged by an outcropping of an unfamiliar conk-like fungus. He got down on his belly and peered closer. Strands of white mycelium showed in the exposed tunnel walls, which clearly ran down into the tangled roots of the horsetail tree.

  Peter pulled his I+ glasses from his field pack and shone a light into the exposed roots. It looked like several smaller tunnels opened off this tunnel’s route before it passed into a clump of roots and then seemed to widen into a dark hole the size of his fist.
Curious, he wormed his fingers through the mass of roots until he could slip his hand inside. Was it some kind of larder? A gathering area for foraging tree scooters to exchange scent information?

  Something crawled onto his fingertip and Peter pulled free his hand. A small green creature scurried up over the back of his knuckles. He rotated his hand slowly, keeping the creature running in circles as it oriented itself toward the sky. “You’re not a local, are you?”

  The little caterpillar froze, its antennae quivering. It was definitely a terrestrial caterpillar. He knew the Believers kept Earth-born pollinators, but the creatures were heavily restricted. There was no good reason a caterpillar should be hiding underground in Sector 13. It couldn’t eat any of the plants or fungi. By all rights, it ought to be dead.

  He reached in his pocket for a specimen container and placed the caterpillar carefully inside. Perhaps it deserved a more careful study, no matter what Songheuser thought.

  Before I came to Huginn, evil was no concern of mine. I knew that terrible things happened in the world, but I refused to ponder them. I knew God had set a course for all of us, and the suffering we experienced was a part of that course. If it seemed wrong, the wrongness came from only the smallness of my own human vision.

  — from MEDITATIONS ON THE MEANING OF EVIL, by MW Williams

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE UTV VIBRATED and jerked as Main Street devolved into an unpaved road. Standish shifted gears and set her teeth until the vehicle adjusted. On this setting, the old rig would suck the batteries dry in only a few hours — as the newest staff member, she’d gotten the shittiest truck. In that, at least, Canaan Lake had proven itself just like any of the other places she’d worked. She swerved to avoid a massive pothole, cursing more than usual. Hattie scrabbled not to slide off the bench seat.