An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  “And what were you doing out there, Peter?”

  “Fieldwork. I found a new species, wanted to get some documentation on it.” He turned the mug in his hands as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

  Vargas looked from one to the other. “You’re sure it’s Duncan?”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “I’d know his boots anywhere. His shirt. His—” He broke off and scrunched his face up tight. “I’d know him anywhere.”

  Sheriff Vargas reached for her hand unit. “Then you’d better take me to him.”

  HUGINN, Day 132

  I sit here in the barn next to my pollinator project, stroking Soolie’s white fur, letting the soft curls of it run over my fingers. He is abominably thin, but there’s not much I can do about it. The livestock are on half-rations, and the dogs on half that. Cheyenne and John already lost their dog. It was so hungry that it tried eating a leather bird it caught out by the lake. It twitched and frothed at the mouth until John broke its neck.

  The dog’s body is hanging in the pantry. I know that meat is meat, and that we are all hungry enough to eat whatever we can find — but I am ashamed to admit I bowed out of cooking tonight.

  It won’t be long before we have to do something about Soolie. I gave him half of my breakfast, but watery oats are hardly food for a human, let alone a big dog like him. Maybe putting him down would be a kindness.

  I know I should think about it that way instead of thinking of it as losing him. But I can’t help wanting the company of my dog. I am so lonely. I hardly see Matthias. He is always working, and I am always alone, whether I am in the kitchen cooking or in the barn, hatching out bees and butterflies as if we remain on the schedule we drew up back on Earth. If we were, then by now we would be feasting on turnip greens and seeing the first heads of oats forming out in the fields. We hadn’t counted on the cold that never seems to leave. Our seeds rot in the ground and the sprouts that survive grow thin and spindly. Even with our imported microbes and carefully nurtured compost piles, this place is inimical to plant life.

  And other life, too, I think. I’ve found cuts on the horses’ legs, small gashes that weep blood as if the flesh is too weak to hold it in. People whisper about what causes it, but I know it is the leather birds, punishing us for that despicable hunting trip. Only Soolie’s presence keeps the things away. I’ve seen him knock one out of the air and rip its wings off, even though he drooled for hours after touching that poison flesh.

  I need Soolie. I have to find a way to keep him strong and healthy.

  I looked up for a moment just now. There were sounds outside, some kind of clanking. I could see Vonda Morris, her face all hollows and her arms like twigs. She didn’t know I watched her as she scooped handfuls of dry dog food into her mouth.

  Her eyes are big and round and sad, like Soolie’s eyes. The eyes of a poor dumb animal, far from home.

  STANDISH PULLED into the narrow driveway in front of Duncan’s plastic house. Her house now, Peter remembered. It was only a few blocks from his own place, but it still rankled. Anyone else would have given him a lift. He reached for the door handle.

  “You’re staying with me tonight,” Standish announced. She was out of the UTV before he could answer, opening the door for him. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  He followed her toward the house, too surprised to answer. Where had the rude bitch from the spaceport gone? She held the door to the house and he staggered inside as if his legs and back had aged fifteen years in the afternoon. Maybe they had. The sight of Duncan’s yellow boots had rearranged something inside of him. His innards ran the wrong way, stifling his breath and his heartbeat.

  She pressed a cold bottle into his hand and steered him toward the couch. It ought to hurt, seeing Duncan’s sagging sofa, but the part of Peter that made feelings had been blocked behind some other misplaced body part. His appendix, perhaps. He remembered the scar on Duncan’s side from an appendectomy in the field, Antarctica or the Galapagos. Had it hurt? Could it have possibly hurt as much as finding Duncan’s body with an air bolt jutting out of its chest and mushrooms growing out of his eyes?

  He lifted the bottle and found it was already empty. He put it down by his feet. Peter thought of asking for another, but Standish was out of sight, clattering in the kitchen behind him. Only Hattie remained, her white ears turned toward him, her dark eyes serious.

  “I came to Huginn because of him,” Peter found himself saying to the dog. She gazed back at him attentively. “I had a great job in Hawaii. I had a wife. A crappy marriage, but a hot wife.” He laughed, as he had taught himself to do every time he told this speech. “I left it all because Duncan tricked me into coming here.”

  Standish appeared in the corner of his eye, hooked the toe of her boot on the leg of the coffee table, and pulled it closer to the couch. “Tricked you into coming here?”

  She put down a tray of snackish-looking things, peanuts and apple slices, some waxy-looking brown cubes that might have been fudge.

  “Halvah,” she explained. “Don’t worry, it’s vegan.”

  He reached for a piece. It melted on his tongue the way his marriage had melted under his yearning to go to Huginn.

  “He showed me things.” Belatedly, he noticed the beers beside the tray and he leaned forward to grab one. “A tree scooter.”

  “That’s all it took? A tree scooter?”

  “It was what I’d been waiting for my entire life,” Peter explained. The beer cap twisted off with a pleasing hiss of carbonation. “Creatures and plants that nobody had ever seen. A world of fungi and lycopods, just waiting for an expert like me.”

  “You and Duncan were a thing, right?” She shoved a slice of apple into her mouth.

  “Forever ago. When I was in grad school,” he clarified. “Duncan was a guide in Belize while I was doing field work down there. We made it work a long time. A long time for Duncan, I mean. He needed adventure. He couldn’t be tied down to one place or one man. I knew it when I went in. After we broke up, I met Meg, and Duncan and I stayed in touch as friends. Good friends, but just friends.”

  “So he didn’t break your heart.”

  His second beer was nearly empty. He reached for a handful of peanuts to keep from draining the bottle. He didn’t want to be drunk in front of this woman he didn’t know. He sat up a little straighter. “Of course not. Like I said, I knew Duncan was just a temporary bit of fun.”

  She rummaged in the pack on the floor and pulled out a ball of pink yarn and a plastic hook. He remembered his grandmother crocheting. It seemed like a weird pastime for a woman like Standish.

  She hooked a bit of yarn. “I get that. I like a bit of fun myself.”

  “Like Brett Takas?” He smirked. He’d dozed off waiting for the police to meet them in Sector 12 and woke to see Standish flirting with Takas, who was wearing a shiny temporary deputy’s star. Vargas had been directing two EMTs into the woods with a stretcher. Peter had closed his eyes then, pretending to sleep so no one would talk to him, the warm weight of Hattie’s head on his knee helping him sink beyond pretense.

  “Well, he is fun,” she laughed.

  Now he put down his beer and turned so he could face her, studying the broad shape of her mouth and the pleasing way her jaw ran into two square corners. “I can be fun.”

  He leaned toward her and cupped his palm around the curve of her long neck. Her olive skin was warm against his beer-cooled hand. Then he pulled her to him and kissed her. Her lips parted against his and for a second he tasted malt on her tongue, and it was the hottest, sweetest, sexiest thing he had ever tasted.

  She pushed him away. “I’m not going to have sex with you,” she said, laughing a little.

  His face burned. “Shit.” He tried to get up, but the dog was in the way, and Standish pulled him back down by his shirt tail.

  “Don’t be an idiot.” She laughed again and then got it under control. “It’s not like you even want to fuck me. You’re still in love with Duncan, for Ch
rist’s sake.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I’m crazy? I didn’t leave my marriage to follow my ex-boyfriend to another planetary system.” She put a fresh beer bottle in his hand. “Look, I get it. It is easier to drink and screw than it is to feel.”

  And just like that, all his feelings snapped back in place, his heart central in his chest and wishing it was an appendix again. “You get it? You get what it’s like to see your best friend, your fucking soulmate, dead in the woods? Nobody fucking gets that!”

  Hattie put her paw up on his knee. Her wet tongue slapped at his cheek, mopping up tears he hadn’t noticed.

  Standish got up. “If you think you’re the first person to have life shit on you, you’re in for a surprise, Petey.”

  “Screw you.”

  “You wish.” She picked up a beer bottle and put it down. “Look, I didn’t lose my boyfriend, but I nearly died out there on Goddard Station when my crawler derailed. I hung upside down with my face pressed against this tiny little window, listening to my air slowly leak into space, just waiting for someone to save me. Waiting for hours with nothing but this vast, sucking darkness punctuated by stars.

  “I couldn’t function for three years. My whole career was built around space stations, and I couldn’t even think about space without losing my shit. The only thing that helped was distraction. Drinking. Fucking. Picking fights with the bartenders that tried to eighty-six me.

  “I lost my job. I got deported to Earth. If I hadn’t taken Songheuser’s aptitude tests and scored so high, I’d be a welfare case doing yet another stint in rehab. Hell, I’d probably be dead by now.”

  She picked up the beer and turned it in her hands, her eyes focused tightly on the label. Silence settled over the beer and peanuts and he couldn’t bring himself to break it. Standish sat down on the floor beside Hattie, massaging the area around the dog’s ears.

  “I had half my face ground off that day. Worker’s comp rebuilt my cheekbone and gave me physical therapy so I could talk again, but it didn’t help with the anxiety that hit me whenever I saw the sky.” She paused. “That’s my story, man. I don’t tell it to just anyone.”

  He took a long pull of his beer. “Thanks,” he finally managed.

  “You’ve saved my life twice,” she said. “I think I’d like to have you as a friend.”

  “A friend.” He rolled his eyes and then felt like a dick for it. At least she couldn’t see his face.

  “Hey, I have high standards for friends. I’ve got about one other in the whole galaxy. So count yourself lucky.”

  He took the olive branch. “I’ll count myself lucky if, as your friend, I can teach you a thing or two about surviving out here. I’m tired of saving your ass.”

  “Whatever you say, Pete.” She stuck out her tongue.

  He rolled his eyes. “Peter. Never Pete. And definitely not ‘Petey.’”

  She reached for another beer. “Aren’t your parents from Mexico? How did you get a name like ‘Peter Bajowski’?”

  “Hey, the US isn’t the only place with immigrants, you know. I had a Polish great-great-grandfather.” He gave a little shrug. “Kids in school gave me a lot of shit for it once my parents brought me back from Mexico.”

  “They lived in the States? So why were you down south?”

  “My folks were both working two or three jobs to pay off their student loans, so my grandma took care of me when I was little. Leaving her was hard.”

  She picked up her yarn and flipped the half-finished pink blanket across his lap. “Yeah, I bet.”

  “I still miss her.” He pulled the soft blanket up to his shoulder. It was extremely soft. He couldn’t help yawning. Standish murmured something that might have been a question, but Peter missed it. His eyelids were already slipping shut.

  The more I think on the metaphysics of the universe, the more certain I am that we, like everything else which exists, are but manifestations of God. We are not flawed, for we exist, and all that is, is God, flawless and complete.

  I imagine it is as if we are an exhalation of God’s breath, vibrating to the tenor of His endless existence. We are all but words in His infinite song.

  And evil? Perhaps evil appears in the moments of silence between the words.

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

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING Standish drove Peter back to Sector 12 and waved awkwardly as he got into his rig and drove away down the road. It was one thing to proclaim they were friends and another thing entirely to wake up and find him snoring on her couch. She hadn’t had a slumber party since she was twelve and discovered half the girls were there because their parents wanted to score points with her dad. She stopped trying to make friends then, and she was sadly out of practice.

  Her one lasting friendship was a result of the other’s persistence, not any skill or effort of Standish’s. Louisa Dewey had refused to be ignored or forgotten.

  Standish checked her hand unit. There was plenty of signal right here, as good as at her house, even, and she had Dewey’s avatar up on screen in an instant. She wondered what ridiculous ringtone Dewey’s hand unit was set to these days.

  The screen went dark as the connection formed and then Louisa Dewey’s face took shape, her eyes heavy and her head still shrouded in plastic from her weekend moisturizing treatment. “Standish?” She blinked a few times. “What the hell are you doing up so early on a weekend?”

  “Having adventures. Did I wake you?”

  “Yes.” She paused. “What do you mean, ‘adventures’? I hope this is a reference to some new conquest.”

  “I should have been out with my latest conquest, but instead I tried to get myself eaten by the local fauna. And uncovered a dead body.” Standish quickly explained the previous day’s events, downplaying her terrifying experience inside the hollow horsetail tree.

  Dewey listened in silence, her lips pressed tight. As the story came to an end, she looked troubled. “So Duncan Chambers was murdered?”

  “It would seem so. Hey, Dewey, did you ever meet Duncan?”

  “Just once. It was a few months after I first came to Huginn. He stopped by Space City to pick up a special order, and a bunch of us had lunch together. He seemed like a good guy. Very funny, very cheerful.”

  “Was there anything strange about him?”

  “You mean murder-inducing? I don’t think so. But I got the impression he was kind of nosy. Asked a lot of questions, wanted to really understand what everybody was working on. I figured it was just part of his Mr Personable thing, but I guess some people could take it the wrong way.” Dewey yawned. “So we still on for next weekend? You must be hankering for some civilization after your troubles yesterday.”

  “We are!” Standish grinned. When she and Dewey had been assigned as roommates back in trade school — before she’d ever even heard of Goddard Station or the Yggdrasil system — the two had immediately gotten a reputation for their powers to turn an ordinary weekend into an epic event. Their shared love of tequila and table dancing had brought them together, and a tendril of friendship had connected their hearts while Standish wasn’t looking.

  “That’s good.” Dewey’s lips went thin again. “I’m glad you made it to Huginn, but I wish you were here in Space City. Canaan Lake sounds dangerous.”

  “I was never in any real danger,” Standish lied. “Besides, Hattie protected me. She yanked that leather bird off my back, and I swear she nearly ripped its wings off. So I hope you’re laying in a supply of treats for my protector.” Her steadfast companion, curled in the passenger seat, made a little snore.

  “Since Hattie’s the reason I got you to come to this system, I already put a steak in the freezer. Give her a hug for me.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Well, I’ve got a lunch date, and I need to glamorize. You be careful out there, Kitty Cat.”

  “I will, Louisa. You know me.”

  “Not comforting, gi
rl.” She made a showy air kiss. “Love you. Bye.”

  “Love you, too.”

  The screen went dark. Standish sat for a moment, still smiling, thinking about Dewey. Dewey had never once asked her for anything, not even money for a beer when she’d been between jobs. Standish’s apartment back on Earth had been full of presents Louisa had sent her from across the galaxy, and she had no doubt there was some trinket wrapped up for her arrival in Space City next week. And more steak for Hattie, too.

  She reached out to rub the dog’s ears. “Did you hear that? Dewey already got you a steak. I bet she’ll even find you some nice ground beef now that you’re a hero dog.”

  Standish frowned. Swiss shepherds might be hero material, but given Hattie’s upbringing, she ought not to be. Therapy dogs were trained to subdue their aggressive and protective instincts, which might cause real trouble in public situations. “And what about your docility chip, girl? I didn’t think you could bite anything bigger than a piece of kibble.”

  Hattie let out another snore, less the stuff of heroics and more comedic fare. Standish started up the UTV and turned it around. Hattie hadn’t seemed any different since they’d arrived on Huginn. She slept more deeply when she napped, perhaps, but that was probably attributable to less ambient noise and more exercise. She acted just as well-behaved around people in town.

  Standish drove slowly, giving Peter plenty of time to reach HQ and sign in his rig. She hoped he wouldn’t wait for her. They could be friends, but she didn’t need to hang out with him all the time. She needed time to think about things.

  Hattie, Huginn — there were just so many pieces that wouldn’t come together in her mind. What had Duncan Chambers been doing out there? What did the papers in his box, like the bills of lading, mean? What had happened to the woman writing the diary? And what about the road, the hidden road in Sector 13 with Duncan’s dead body at the end?

  An idea struck her. Hadn’t everyone told her Canaan Lake was a small, small town? The kind of place where everyone knew everyone else’s business? Peter might not have known anything about the hidden road, and neither had Sheriff Vargas or any of the townies, but someone who lived at this end of Canaan Lake had certainly seen something. Especially if that someone liked to traipse through the woods.