An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  She’d seen a scar just like it on Shane Vogel’s ribs.

  We acted as dogs, so we became as dogs.

  What if Hepzibah hadn’t been hallucinating when she wrote about the dogs with human eyes? Standish’s mouth felt like dust. “Hattie, come!”

  She yanked hard on the collar, lifting the dog’s front legs. Standish stretched her other arm to get a grip around Hattie’s ribs, but she was too slow. The brown dog surged forward, snarling, its teeth slashing at Standish’s face. She stumbled backward and smashed into the transmission tower, loosing Hattie.

  Hattie rushed forward, slamming into the other dog, growling, biting, snarling. The baying and yipping of dogs was too loud for Standish to even think. A gray shape rushed at her and she kicked at it. A dog yelped, and Standish scrambled up onto the transmission tower.

  “Hattie!” she shrieked.

  The gray dog sank its teeth into Standish’s boot and yanked hard. Standish kicked free and climbed to the next crossbar. Her hand slipped and for a second she hung from one fist, but then her feet found purchase and she caught herself. The gray dog leaped, its claws raking Standish’s pants. She climbed higher, her heart pounding.

  Hattie gave a screech of pain. Then she ripped herself free of the brown dog, her white fur spattered red all over, and tore off through the trees.

  “Hattie,” Standish sobbed.

  The pack raced after Hattie, save for the gray dog and a shaggy black Labrador-looking beast that began to circle around the base of the tower. Standish climbed up another rung. The wind was stronger up here. The lanky metal structure swayed a little, the carbon-mesh vibrating like a tuning fork. Standish clamped her arms around the nearest strut and pressed her face to the mesh, squeezing shut her eyes. If the rain picked up, it would be even harder to hold on.

  She opened her eyes and found herself level with most of the trees. She’d climbed higher than she thought. The forest stretched out around her, a great green swathe of trees, a green so dark it was nearly black. If she fell, she would vanish into that blackness, as impossible to find as Duncan Chambers and the air bolt gun that had killed him.

  A patch of gray to the south caught her attention. It was a large rectangle, probably the size of the whole mill yard, and she thought that if she had kept running the day the leather birds had been chasing her, she probably would have run straight into it. The trees there looked like skeletons, their fronds dried and fallen. The distinct shape of a UTV sat in the middle of it, a blanket of dead fronds laying over its cab and hood. She thought she saw two dark shapes inside, but if that rig had moved in the last six months, it had been only at the hands of the wind.

  Her tower rocked a little harder and Standish cried out. She hooked her leg around the strut and clung tighter. Now that she had seen the zone of dead gray, she couldn’t look away.

  This was what Songheuser had been hiding when they’d closed their road and torn out their work station. This was their secret.

  To the west, a dog howled, long and loud, and the dogs at the base of the tower took up the call. Standish pressed herself tighter to the strut as the rain fell over her in cold rivulets. She couldn’t tell her tears from the rain.

  Hattie was gone. Half of her self was gone.

  The dogs howled again, and she thought she had never heard a lonelier sound or felt so alone.

  THE EARLY MORNING sunshine made the broken glass sparkle on HQ’s steps as Peter walked with Sheriff Vargas toward the front door. One of the windows had been boarded over, and smoke stained the Songheuser logo. They paused in front of the doors and turned back to look at the scorched and battered mill on the other side of the street.

  It was impossible to take in the full extent of the disaster with one look. Parts of the exterior fence had been torn down to let the fire trucks get access to different parts of the mill yard, and heaps of rubble sat beside the road where work crews had cleared it out of the emergency vehicles’ way. Most of the mill’s buildings were intact, but the whole place had a disfigured, unhappy look about it. Peter had never seen the mill yard empty before. It looked lonely without anyone moving around in it.

  “This turned out to be a pretty crappy frame-job. Once the security tapes were reviewed — and Songheuser wouldn’t listen to my team’s opinion; the tapes were analyzed by four different law enforcement agencies — it was pretty obvious you were innocent. I can’t hold you for a crime you didn’t commit,” Vargas said. “But are you sure I shouldn’t keep you another day for your own safety?”

  “I’ll be safe enough here.” He gave her an attempt at a smile. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but your jail cells aren’t really that comfortable. Plus, I like a little privacy when I pee.”

  “The town is wound tight. I saw Belinda set those charges on the security cameras, but that doesn’t mean anyone else is ready to believe she’s a part of this. You stay low. Don’t leave the office.”

  “I shouldn’t need to.” Peter looked over his shoulder at the wreckage. “I can’t believe Belinda was willing to do this.”

  “No one’s going to believe it.” Vargas sighed. “Her frame-job might not have held up, but it bought her enough time to get away, and people won’t want to give you up as a suspect. You sure you don’t want an armed guard? I could put Paul Wu on it. He likes you more than you think.”

  “No, I’ll be fine.” He hoped he wasn’t lying to the both of them.

  “Then I’ll leave you here. Remember — keep a low profile until we get some of these people behind bars. Belinda couldn’t have done this alone.”

  “Sheriff?”

  “What is it?”

  Peter hesitated. “Why are you helping me? What’s in it for you?”

  She shook her head. “Jesus, Pete, why do you have make it personal?”

  “Because I get the feeling it is?”

  She sighed. “I signed up for this job to protect people like you. Good people, who go to work and do their jobs and go to city council meetings and try to make their communities decent places. My job is to keep this town a decent place.” She tucked her thumbs in her gun belt and stood a little taller. “A lot of people have been telling me how to do my job lately, and I’m getting sick of it.”

  “So you’re ‘sticking it to the Man’? That’s what this is about?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t ruin my counterculture insurgence by being a terrorist or some stupid shit. Get in that office and keep your nose clean, Pete, and I’ll keep looking after you.”

  The sheriff turned on her heel and headed back down to her rig. Peter watched her for a second and turned to face the office. It looked more battered than it had with Vargas beside him.

  He stepped inside. The empty office building held the same atmosphere he’d felt when he’d gone to close up his grandmother’s house after she moved into assisted living. The walls were still there, but the life had gone out of the place. The smell of smoke clung to everything.

  His office had been neatly locked up after the police search, and that comforted him a little. Even after he’d been cleared, he’d worried he’d be coming back to a pink slip, his stuff boxed up on the curb just to show him his politics were that unwelcome. But his terrariums were all intact and his gear was still stowed where it ought to be. He began misting his plants and studying his specimens. The club moss in his flora-only tank soaked up the water, fluffing visibly. He had to throw out one of the transplanted ferns, which had failed to take root and then succumbed to some kind of powder mildew.

  But the flora in the terrarium with the caterpillars and scooters seemed to have survived their uprooting and settled into their new home. The tree scooters looked happy, too, or at least busy, the scooters moving in and out of their burrow and digging energetically around the base of the tiny horsetail seedling in the corner. Peter put down the mister and knelt beside the windowsill, impressed by all the activity.

  A scooter burst out of the burrow hole, paused to rub its antennae with prickly forearms,
and scooted toward the horsetail seedling, its legs a blur beneath its pink segmented body. As much as he’d like to retain an objective perspective on the little thing, he had to admit it was awfully cute. It buried its face in the fluffy humus at the base of the seedling and came up with a mouthful of stringy white mycelium.

  Peter reached for the tweezers he kept on a tray beside the terrariums. He’d seen that mycelium before, and now he was kicking himself for overlooking the stuff. He plucked a clump of mycelium-rich humus. He didn’t need a microscope to know this came from a terrestrial organism, not a Huginn native.

  The lichen- and fungus-like organisms of Huginn were only like terrestrial lichens and fungi. These organisms were roughly commensurate to the things he’d known on Earth, but their differences were substantial — despite the easy analogies his Earthling brain wanted to make. Sure, Y-fungus (some pre-settlement biologist’s lazy naming strategy for the genera) made mycelial chains that spread through organic material, dissolving them in an almost identical fashion to Earth’s mushroom species. But like most things on Huginn, the mycelium of Y-fungus came in fantastical colors and constructions. Webs of needlelike structures forming regular polyhedrons were typical structures for a Huginn native. White strings? That was an Earth strategy.

  He put the mycelium in a dish for further examination and turned his attention back to the scooters happily mining the stuff and hauling it to their burrow. He couldn’t imagine they were eating it. Outside of the honeydew he’d seen the scooters harvesting from the caterpillars, he hadn’t seen any organisms successfully feed on anything from the other solar system.

  So what were they doing with it?

  He slid aside the cardboard that obscured the back corner of the terrarium, exposing the tunnels of the creature’s home. The scooters hurried to and from the largest chamber, a room about the size of his doubled fists, where the caterpillars had taken up residence. Little heaps of mycelium and dirt surrounded the four caterpillars, who had clearly grown in the past few days. They slurped up strands of mycelium like customers at a ramen shop.

  Peter replaced the cardboard. The caterpillars had clearly found a perfect foodstuff in the mycelium, and he’d seen the tree scooters milking the caterpillars for their honeydew. Their symbiotic relationship was obvious.

  But what kind of mycelium was it? And was it helping or hurting Huginn’s forests? Some mushrooms killed trees. Others poisoned the creatures around them. This mycelium could be a dangerous import.

  He frowned at the other tank, the terrarium with only rock-eater lichen and a sampling of club mosses. There was a difference between this tank and the one with the tree scooters, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. After all his years in the field, he knew the sensation currently prickling him — a feeling something like walking with a rock in his shoe. He was missing something and it was nagging at him in a powerfully annoying way.

  He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and forgot the irritation of the other problem. The cocoon in his third tank had finally hatched. The butterfly sat on top of the hollowed structure, slowly flexing its blue wings. Light danced across their golden freckles.

  Peter jumped to his feet and grabbed the box Chameli had given him. He opened it carefully, despite the tremor of excitement in his hands, and used a pair of tweezers to lift one of the specimens from the box. He held it out and compared the two creatures. The wing shape, the color, the golden specks: he had found it. He had found Olive’s butterflies.

  The real question, though, was whether or not the symbiotic caterpillars were the same as the first one he’d captured. If they were the same, that meant he’d identified the two major life stages of a terrestrial life form that had somehow managed to not just adapt to an extraterrestrial environment, but also establish a symbiotic relationship with an alien life form. But unless he sequenced their DNA — not likely for now — then he’d have to wait for these new caterpillars to go through metamorphosis before he knew for certain he’d found the same species. Which meant waiting and watching.

  The feeling of the rock in the shoe returned, and he pushed it away. Peter went to his desk to check for messages from Mark. As he sat down, he felt his shirt catch on his desk drawer. It was a cheap desk with rough corners, and he was always careful to push the drawers completely closed. He only had so many shirts.

  Frowning, he pulled open the drawer and felt ice go down his spine. All his notes about the degassing compound were missing.

  God’s plans are quieter than you’d expect. He could shout the truth, bellow it like thunder, put it on a sign and give it armed deputies so as to make sure it was protected and followed. But God is no bully eager to show off his strength. His power is all around us, if we only have the ears to listen to its gentle melody.

  Sometimes I hear only the silences between His words, and at those times I weep to think how weak my hearing is.

  — from THE COLLECTED WISDOM OF MW WILLIAMS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  STANDISH LAY on her bed with a pillow hugged tight to her stomach. A sliver of sunlight had appeared on the floor in front of the door, warning her that Wodin had passed out of the sky and that there were gaps in the clouds. Thinking about the sky made it hard to breathe.

  Dr Holt had been right. Standish had been so smug back in her office, blowing off her prescriptions. But something had happened to Hattie, and now Standish was trapped alone in her bedroom, too tense to get off the goddamn bed. A tiny sound like a mosquito’s buzz filled the room, and Standish realized it came from her, a strangled whine squeezed unwillingly from her anxious throat.

  The soft rapping on the front door was barely audible over the irritating noise.

  “Standish?”

  The door knob rattled and the door swung open. She’d been too fucked up to even lock the door behind her when she came home. She still wasn’t sure how she’d made it out of the woods, let alone driven home. It had been raining. Maybe that had helped.

  “Kate?” The figure in the doorway was backlit by the searingly bright sunshine. He closed the door and gloom restored itself to the room.

  She forced herself to sit up and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Matthias?”

  He came to the bed and perched on the edge. “I was so worried.” His hands fumbled across the bedspread until they found hers. “I saw Hattie with the dog pack. I thought—”

  “She ran away. Well, they drove her away, but still. She ran away just like all the other dogs.” She blinked hard, even though he couldn’t see her. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone seeing her crying.

  “She’s not like them,” he reassured her. “Hattie’s a good dog.”

  She scooted closer to him. “They’re not… ordinary dogs, are they?”

  He put his arm around her shoulder. “No.”

  His shoulder was warm and solid, and he smelled like rain and strong soap. He seemed entirely normal, not like someone who might have lived for more than a hundred years and probably turned into a dog at night. And yet it all added up. Hepzibah’s diary? Olive Whitley’s strange transformation from a regular kid into a girl who was practically a forest spirit? The dreams she herself had where Hattie had truly become her other half, just as she’d secretly believed?

  Normal didn’t seem to apply here on Huginn. There was a magic in belief here that didn’t exist on other worlds.

  “I’m just glad you’re all right. I thought — well, I don’t want to think about what I thought.” His hand found her head and stroked it, just as she would have stroked Hattie’s.

  That was too much. Her confusion boiled into something like rage. Standish sat up and snapped on the light. He winced, his hazel eyes blinking hard.

  “I want to know everything. What are the dogs? Who are you? And why isn’t Shane Vogel dead?”

  “He was.”

  “I know he was, I was fucking there!” Anger simmered in her chest, pushing away the last threads of her anxiety. She’d used anger to fig
ht it before, anger and sex and booze. Now she had something worth being angry about. “You’re not going to lie to me.”

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to.” He stretched out his hand and she pushed it away. “When I saw Hattie running with the dogs, I knew I couldn’t lie to you anymore.”

  “Who are you?” she repeated. “Were you really married to Hepzibah Williams?”

  “Yes.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I remember her like I don’t remember much else. I really loved her. I know that.”

  She jumped to her feet. “You don’t ‘remember much’? What, is a hundred years of life on this moon too much for you?”

  He stood, his palms out. “You have to understand. Until recently, I didn’t understand it myself. I could remember certain things, things like getting here, trying to start our farm, watching Hepzibah die. But it was all a muddle. And I didn’t know about the dogs. I wasn’t sure, not until…” He winced a little. “Not until the night before last.”

  “What happened that night?”

  “When I woke up in the cemetery after you left, I was me, only—”

  “A dog.”

  “Part of me was used to it. Part of me knew what to do when they started digging up Shane’s grave. I was one of the pack, one of them. But then he came out, and he drove me off. I was alone for first time in a hundred years. All the pieces started coming together.” He sat back down on the bed, his eyes blind to her. “We deserved to be punished for as long as it took.”

  “Punished for what?”

  “For what we did! We acted as dogs, and we became as dogs.”

  The words made her shiver. She sat down on the bed and held his eyes with hers. “What do you mean?”

  “You saw them at the post office, Shane and Vonda and all of them. They didn’t want me to be their leader any more. I’m all alone.”

  “You’re not alone. You have me and Peter,” she snapped. “Now tell me what this is all about.”

  “I started remembering things differently after Duncan disappeared. We were out there in the woods and there was this smell. A wrong smell. And when I smelled it, I started to remember. I would be working in my fields or falling asleep, and I’d remember what it was like to be a dog. And when I was a dog, sometimes I’d remember what it was like to be a man.”