Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Reggie still needs one more piece of information.”

  “What’s that?”

  Very slowly, Reggie said, “The message, please.”

  “Oh, right!” Axel tried to remember the message he’d worked out during the night, as he’d peeked out from under the blankets and stared out through the window—at the rectangle of indigo speckled with pinpoints of light—and imagined all the “space guys” out there. Space and Time and Time and Space—They might look like Axel: blue theropods with coal-black eyes, tiny forepaws and clumpy feet—but without the long scar down his back; or they might look like one of the other saurs—miniature tyrannosaurs or ceratopsians or long-necked sauropods or crested hadrosaurs. Or they might look like human guys, or birds, or jellyfish, or clouds—

  “What is the message?” Reggie asked.

  “Okay-okay-okay. The message—” Axel held out the last syllable as long as he could to buy a little more time. “—is—it’s—‘Hiya!’ ”

  “That is the message?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The complete message?” Reggie didn’t often emphasize his adjectives that way.

  “I don’t know. Is that enough? What else should I say?”

  Reggie paused long enough to formulate an appropriate answer. “You may say as much or as little as you like, but it is customary to tell the recipient of a message who you are.”

  “Why?”

  It may just have been a function of the old hard drive (technology had long since moved past the use of them), but Axel heard a strange, almost nervous, clicking coming from inside the brain box.

  “Because the recipient might possibly—for some reason completely unknown to Reggie—want to send a message back to you, in reply.”

  “Heyyy—” Axel imagined the screensaver running backward—you could do that if you looked at it hard enough—back through space the other way. “Space guys! Yeah!”

  “You may also want to tell them a little about yourself,” Reggie suggested. “Where you live. What you do. Where you come from—just to be friendly.”

  “Ohhh! Yes! Got it! Yes! I can say—‘Hiya! I’m Axel, and I live in this big house and I’m here with all my friends. We’re saurs, you know, all of us except for the human who brings us food and cleans up stuff. His name is Tom. But we’re saurs!

  “ ‘Saurs are like dinosaurs. They were these really big guys who lived a long time ago and went extinct. We’re supposed to look like them except we’re smaller and we don’t have the scary parts.

  “ ‘We came from a factory that was like a laboratory too, and we were made out of living stuff—you know, biology.

  “ ‘They made millions of us and sold us to humans as toys. All these human guys who made us made big, big money and drove around in giant bankmobiles and wore top hats and had houses a thousand times bigger than this place. But then they had to stop selling us.

  “ ‘Turned out we were smarter than we were supposed to be, and lived longer. This lady from the Atherton Foundation said we weren’t toys at all but real-real-real things that were alive and they shouldn’t be selling us.

  “ ‘But we kept getting cut up and run over, or the kids who owned us stepped on us or threw us out of windows. Or the parents who bought us drove us to the woods and left us there—or they stopped feeding us and stuff like that. So after a while there weren’t many of us left.

  “ ‘People started to believe the Atherton lady. They set up a bunch of houses for us and that’s how we got to live here.

  “ ‘We do all sorts of stuff the guys who made us didn’t think we could do, like think and feel and live longer than three years. My buddy Preston writes books. My other buddy Diogenes reads all the stuff in the library. And the Five Wise Buddhasaurs, who don’t say anything but they play this stuff that sounds like music sometimes. And Agnes is this stegosaur with plates on her back and spikes on her tail and she knows all about humans and what’s wrong with them. She’s twenty-five years old, so she must know everything. Doc is smart too, but he’s nice!

  “ ‘The guys who made us said we couldn’t make eggs because we don’t have the right parts and stuff, but we can do that too! Not me, but like Bronte and Kara—female guys. The humans aren’t supposed to know, except for Tom and Dr. Margaret—she’s the lady who comes every week to make sure we’re not sick or dead. I’m not supposed to know either because they think I can’t keep a secret, so don’t tell the other space guys about this, okay?

  “ ‘And when I finish this message, I’m gonna build Rotomotoman. He’s this cool robot I dreamed about last night. Reggie’s gonna help me, because Reggie’s the very-best-smartest whole computer in the world. Then I’m gonna get on a starship and travel all through time and space and save the universe and crash into supernovas and get sucked into wormholes.’ ”

  Axel took a long, necessary breath, then said to Reggie, “Is that okay?”

  “Under the circumstances,” Reggie said, “Your message is—exceptional.”

  “Wow!”

  “It is, however, customary to ask after the well-being of the recipient of the message, and to close the message—”

  “Oh, oh, I know! I know! So I’ll say, ‘Hope you’re okay. Your friend, Axel.’ Like that, right?”

  “The message will be sent as you dictated it,” Reggie replied, “with a few grammatical corrections.”

  “All right!” Axel leapt up. “A message to space! Thank you, Reggie! Oh, thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!”

  “You are very welcome, Axel,” said Reggie. Then, with what one might interpret as a trepidatious pause—and with careful attention to pronunciation—he asked, “Now, please explain to Reggie, what is a Ro-to-mo-to-man?”

  * * *

  Tom Groverton stood at the door of the room where the saurs slept. Eyes half open, hair still mussed, a middle button of his shirt undone, he said the word “breakfast” clearly but not too loudly and stepped back as the little ones ran past him.

  The bigger saurs rose slowly: grunting, grumbling and stretching. The triceratops named Charlie always had a little trouble righting himself. He braced up against his mate, Rosie, until his hind legs were reasonably straight. The two gray stegosaurs, Agnes and Sluggo, went through a ritual that resembled push-ups—hind legs first, then forelegs up slowly with a sliding sort of motion.

  Hubert and Diogenes, the two biggest theropods—each over a meter and a half tall—helped the other big guys, like Sam and Dr. David Norman. Tails really do help.

  Diogenes lent a forepaw to Doc, the light brown tyrannosaur with a “tricky” left leg.

  “Thank you, my friend,” Doc said, his eyes barely visible under his thick lids. “Each day it seems to get a little harder.”

  “It does for everyone,” said Tom Groverton from the doorway.

  Doc nodded. “But not quite the same way for everyone. You were a little one once, who grew into an adult. We saurs were engineered. We were ‘born’ with our eyes open. What growth we experienced is beyond memory. The little ones stay little and the big ones were always big.”

  “Either way, we grow old,” Tom insisted.

  “Until we grow cold.” Doc smiled serenely. “Or perhaps you can say we wear out instead.”

  “So do we.”

  As Hubert and Diogenes folded up the blankets and covers, Tom walked over to the wheeled, bassinet-sized hospital bed in the center of the room. Upon it was a figure who was recognizably a saurian and recognizably a theropod, but whose limbs—all of them—were missing and whose tail was a crushed-looking stump. Several long-healed scars criss-crossed his abdomen and where his eyes should have been were empty sockets.

  “Good morning, Hetman,” Tom said to the figure on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not so bad.” Hetman’s voice was faint and raspy, always a little more so in the morning. “I had an odd dream. Odd, but pleasant.”

  “What was it?” Doc asked, resting his forepaws on the bed railing.

  �
�Very odd. Very odd indeed.” Hetman turned his head toward the voices. “Can you imagine me riding on a horse’s back?”

  “I can, old friend.” Doc closed his eyes. “Like Zagloba, the Cossack—rebellious, reckless, full of life—riding with incomparable skill.” He opened his eyes again and smiled. “It must have been a splendid dream.”

  Hubert and Diogenes stood at the bed railing, ready to move Hetman downstairs to breakfast.

  “Like some help?” Tom offered.

  “They can manage.” Doc spoke for them. Hubert and Diogenes were quite literate and articulate but spoke only when necessity dictated. “Thank you all the same, but you better get downstairs before Jean-Claude and Pierrot get impatient. You remember yesterday.”

  The day before, Jean-Claude and Pierrot chanted “Meat! Meat! Breakfast Meat!” until even the little ones who ate nothing but soy pellets and oatmeal shouted along.

  Tom nodded. He looked at the other saurs who had still not gone down to breakfast: Agnes, Sluggo, Kara, Preston and Bronte. All of them were looking up at Tom except for Bronte. The bright green apatosaur was gazing in the direction of Hetman’s bed.

  Tom gave them an asymmetrical grin before leaving the room. “Well, don’t wait too long.”

  When he was gone, Hetman whispered, “Check the egg! I twisted in my sleep last night. I’m afraid I may have hurt it!”

  Hubert turned Hetman gently on his side and lifted his pillow as Doc watched. Under the pillow was a pale yellow egg, no more than a few centimeters long.

  “It’s fine,” said Doc.

  “Don’t let Doc pick it up,” said Agnes. “The clumsy oaf.”

  “My dear Agnes, I had no intention.”

  Sluggo had already run over to retrieve a tiny cardboard box stuffed with cotton, hidden behind the chest near the window, where the blankets and covers were kept. He pushed it back along the floor with his snout. Diogenes picked up the egg and carefully placed it in the little box.

  Agnes nudged past Sluggo and examined it, almost sniffing it, in search of the slightest possible fracture. “I guess it looks okay.”

  Kara butted Agnes with her head. She was an apatosaur, but her head was big—and hard. “Let Bronte see. It’s her egg, after all.”

  “Oh. Right.” Agnes stepped back and let Bronte timidly press in.

  As Bronte stared, a set of three tiny furrows took their place on her forehead. She worried, she pitied, she pondered, all at once as she took in the egg’s contours and slightly rough surface. She held her breath and stared.

  They all did, gathered around the cardboard box, except for Hetman, who listened as carefully as the others watched.

  “The shell looks so frail,” whispered Sluggo.

  “Are you an idiot?” said Agnes. “Have you touched it? It’s like granite. She won’t have the strength to break through that shell.”

  “Or he,” Doc suggested.

  “What do you know?” Agnes grumbled.

  “What do any of us know?”

  Agnes grumbled again, but left it at that.

  None of them knew if the time was soon for the first hairline cracks to form on the shell—for the little creature who might be within to break through the calcium walls of her prison and her protection—or his. Now. Later. Or ever.

  Agnes’ egg had had a yolk and a fetal sac, but no infant. So had Kara’s. Bronte’s first egg had contained a tiny, almost shapeless thing that never moved and never showed any signs that it could have moved, like some little plastic charm in the center of a bar of soap. The saurs had sealed that one carefully in a little plastic box and buried it in the garden.

  In the past few months they had combed every database they could find with any bit of information about egg-laying creatures. They knew about ostriches and cobras, platypuses and echidnas. They even read about dinosaurs—the “real” ones, the ones who had lived millions of years before. It helped them guess at what might—or what should—happen, if anyone could have guessed that this could happen at all, which no one had.

  Bronte had even practiced with bird eggs Sluggo had found out in the yard, eggs that had fallen out of nests in the trees. They hatched successfully, but who knew if the egg of a saur was anything like the egg of a sparrow?

  “It needs heat,” said Bronte, who spoke rarely, and then only in a whisper.

  “Sit on it,” said Agnes. “Gently.”

  “It’s too frail,” said Sluggo.

  “Put it by the window, in the sun,” said Kara.

  “Too much,” Agnes replied. “You might boil it. Then, what if it clouds up in the afternoon?”

  “We might ask Tom,” Sluggo suggested meekly. “Or Dr. Margaret.”

  “No!” Agnes thumped her tail on the floor. “It’s not their business! It’s our business! Besides, they won’t know any better than we do. And besides that besides, if it gets out that we’re producing eggs the humans out there will go into a panic. They’ll stick us in labs again and examine us and try to work out what went wrong. Or they’ll just round us up and exterminate the whole lot of us.”

  “They—they wouldn’t do that,” said Sluggo. The words didn’t come out with quite the certainty he intended.

  Agnes sailed on the energy of her own bleak visions. “They might even decide they like the eggs and make us sit in pens and lay them like chickens! They’ll boil, scramble and fry them!”

  “No!” Bronte and Sluggo gasped almost in unison.

  Kara simply butted Agnes again. “Shut up!”

  “Mark my words!” Agnes gave each syllable blunt, apocalyptic emphasis. “You can’t trust humans! They say one thing then do the other. They want the whole damn place for themselves. They want everything. Everything! They’re greedy and sneaky and creepy and they kill things for pleasure! They screw up everything then go around and look for more things to screw up!”

  “That’s true,” said Preston, who for all the thousands of words he’d written, bent over a keyboard, tapping away with his four digits, rarely spoke more than a dozen words in a month. “After all, they made us.”

  “What kind of a joke is that?” Agnes’ spiked tail swept the air in a short arc.

  “Tom isn’t like that,” said Sluggo. “Dr. Margaret isn’t like that.”

  “They aren’t now.” Agnes lowered her tail. “But they can turn on you just like that! It’s all that meat. It poisons their brains and they go crazy. That’s why you always have to keep your eyes on them.”

  “Dr. Margaret doesn’t eat meat,” Sluggo reminded her. “She’s an herbivore.”

  “A vegetarian, you mean,” said Doc.

  “Oh, shut up! Who asked you anyway?” Agnes sneered at Doc.

  “Who asked you?” said Kara. “We were talking about the egg.”

  “What we need,” said Doc, resting a forepaw on Bronte’s back, “is patience. We must be careful and observant. This egg may not hatch, my dear. But if it doesn’t we will learn more and know better next time.”

  “Someday,” Kara whispered, “one will hatch.”

  “I hope so.” Doc patted her consolingly. “But as much as I hate to say this, it may also be possible that—in our genetic idiosyncrasies—we may be only capable of performing half the job.”

  “Oh, who died and made you king?” Agnes turned away in disgust—or perhaps to hide her pained expression momentarily.

  Doc smiled and gently said, “Sweet Agnes, pay no attention to me, then. I am just a lame old fool who knows nothing except that he loves all his good friends here assembled.”

  “You old windbag!” Agnes backed away. “As if I trusted carnosaurs any better than humans! You’re all filled with baloney!”

  “Nevertheless,” said Hetman, his weak voice belying his proximity, “I have a feeling this one will hatch. Just a feeling, but they’re about all I have left.”

  “Hetman,” Agnes said after an embarrassed pause, “I didn’t mean you when I said that about carnosaurs. I—I get carried away sometimes.”

&n
bsp; “Do you?” Kara snorted.

  “If you didn’t get carried away,” said Hetman, “I’d fear I’d been spirited off to another house in the night. Don’t apologize for being Agnes, Agnes.”

  She responded with a rumble—this time from her stomach. A moment later, Doc’s stomach made a stuttered purr, like the starting up of an old internal combustion engine.

  “Breakfast,” said Kara.

  Hubert and Diogenes nodded and pushed Hetman’s bed toward the door, where they nearly collided with the blue blur of a breathless theropod.

  “Preston! Hey! Preston!”

  Axel slowed himself just long enough to shout a hurried “Hiya!” to Hetman, Hubert and Diogenes, then he charged on, coming to a halt as he slid broadside into Agnes.

  “Uff! Will you watch it!” Agnes barked. “Isn’t it enough—”

  “Sorry-sorry, Agnes. Preston! Preston! Can I have—”

  His attention was drawn to the cardboard box, and its contents.

  “Heyyy!” Axel took a careful look inside. “There it is!”

  Doc nodded. “There it is.”

  He looked around at the others and pointed to the box. “That’s the egg!” he said, as if they might not know yet.

  “Indeed,” said Doc.

  “Know what that means?” Axel continued.

  “No,” Agnes sighed impatiently. “What does that mean?”

  “Someone’s been having SEX!”

  “Oh, shut up!” Agnes shouted. “You don’t know a thing about it!”

  “Yes-yes-yes-yes! I learned all about it from the Reggie! I saw ‘Animal Mating Practices and Habits,’ ‘Barnyard Babies,’ ‘From Sperm to Germ’—or something like that, and—and I saw ‘Angelique Blows Her Birthday Candles.’ ”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Agnes’ back plates clicked with the tremor of her tail smacking the floor. “Are you completely—”

  “Axel,” said Doc, “not that I want to distract you, but you came up here to ask Preston something, didn’t you?”

  “Yes! Right! Yes!” Axel stepped over to Preston. “Can I have five thousand dollars?”

  Agnes gasped. “What!”