An Android Dog's Tale (14 page)

“
The PM has probably considered that,
too, you know,
” Tam reminded her. “
A bit of squabbling among
the primitives is taken into account in its projections, I’m
sure.
”

“
I know that’s what it expects will
happen, and it might even be right, but why make them go through
all of that when we can just bud the village a bit early?
”

Tam shrugged. “
I don’t know, but it’s not
my decision—and it’s not yours either. We should be going. Good
luck with the villagers.
” Like most trade androids, Tam was a
loyal company man, or machine, or whatever.

She stopped him again. “
One more request.
Leave MO-126 here. He can help me monitor the situation.
”

“
I don’t mind,
” the android dog said
before Tam could argue against the idea. It sounded far more
interesting than heading back to the hub terminal to wait for their
next mission, which remained over a month away.

Tam sent the request and Field Ops granted
it. Apparently the situation did not call for mitigation, but it
did justify close monitoring, which was the mobile observer’s
primary function.

“
Okay,
” Tam said to their hostess.
“
Call Field Ops if MO-126 will be delayed.
” Then he hefted
his backpack and left. His partner knew he did not mind traveling
alone, but the artificial dog did feel a bit guilty, as if he were
abandoning him.

Tam seemed unconcerned, so the android dog
put his subjective and unjustified emotional reaction aside. He
seldom performed anything other than trade interface duty and
looked forward to doing something different.

~*~

Granny Greenflower gave MO-126 a layout of
the village. He went to Movey’s hut as the first stop of his
clandestine surveillance effort. As he approached, he heard voices
inside and tried to move around to the back where he could
eavesdrop inconspicuously. As with so many simple, easy plans, this
one did not work.

He almost tripped over the dusty old mongrel
sleeping in the shade provided by the hut. The lazing dog opened
one menacing eye and growled. The other eye was scarred over,
probably in the same fight that cost him one of his ears years
before. MO-126 wondered how his opponent faired. Not well, he
imagined.

‘Go away, pup,’ the growl warned. The old
dog did not get up. Apparently, he did not think the new dog worth
the effort.

“Woof?” MO-126 replied softly, which he
intended to mean, ‘I wish no offense, but would you mind if I stuck
around for a while?’

Another growl, this one showing a few yellow
but very long teeth, suggested he did.

A moment later, a bearded man in a
knee-length linen tunic and gond leather sandals rounded the
house.

“What is it, Brott?” asked a voice from
inside the hut.

“It’s just the trader’s dog,” yelled the
villager, turning back toward the front of the hut. Even from a
distance, MO-126 could smell beer on his breath.

“Did Old Bagger eat it yet?” the man, who
must be Movey, said.

“Nah; he’s just laying there. I don’t think
he’s hungry.” Both men laughed.

MO-126 failed to find their largely
monosyllabic conversation amusing. It might be funny if the old,
and possibly cannibalistic, dog did try to eat him. Even if ‘Old
Bagger’ could disable him, which was unlikely but not impossible,
he would probably break his remaining teeth on the android dog’s
cordilith bones. MO-126 saw several drawbacks to testing this
theory, so he diplomatically retreated to a spot out of sight of
both the old dog and the doorway and increased the sensitivity of
his auditory receptors.

MO-126 focused on the continuing
conversation inside the hut, filtering out the clatter of crude
furniture being shifted and clay mugs being filled.

“Is Jalik going to support me if I call for
a meeting?” Movey said.

“It’s hard to tell. When I ask him, all he
does is grunt.”

“Hah! He’s gotten too fond of his pigs, I
think.”

“Especially the one he married,” the man
named Brott snorted.

Additional laughter ensued. Not knowing
Jalik or his wife, MO-126 withheld judgment on how much of an
exaggeration the comment implied. He doubted that the man in
question married a real pig, although humans were notable for doing
the unexpected. It seemed far more likely that his wife was human,
perhaps a stout, pale woman with an upturned nose.

“What about Yamal?” Movey asked his
associate.

“Oh, he’ll support you. I told him you’d
take fewer of his chickens for the village pot when you’re the
headman. Klamik will cast his vote for you, too.”

“What did you promise him?”

“That his sister’s house wouldn’t burn
down.” This comment prompted additional laughter. They were a
jovial pair in a crude, unpleasant sort of way.

They continued naming family elders and
discussing who they were likely to support and how they might get
them to side with Movey. He planned to call for a village meeting
in which each family leader would cast a vote for the new headman.
He seemed confident that about half of the men would side with him,
but enough remained publicly uncommitted to tip the scales.

“It would have been so much simpler if old
Dunwood named you the new headman before he died,” Brott
commented.

“Well, he didn’t,” Movey said. “And I can’t
put this off much longer. Without a headman, the choice will have
to be made by the family leaders. I’d like to be sure of more
support before we call on them to do it, though.”

“I don’t think we can get any more people to
stand firm with you without openly threatening them, and that would
probably cause you to lose others. I say we call for a vote. One
way or another, you’re going to be the next headman.”

“Yeah. I’d just like it to be easy. I’ll go
to see Ranex tomorrow morning. He probably wants this over,
too.”

“Do you think you’ll have problems with him
after?”

“Probably not if he thinks most of the
family elders are behind me. He’ll fall into line, then. If not,
yeah, he could try to cause trouble.”

“Nothing we can’t handle,” the other man
said.

~*~

It took close to an hour for MO-126 to find
Ranex, the other contender for village headman. The mobile observer
android found his hut was empty when he arrived there to do some
more clandestine observing. He suspected the man might be out
trying to hustle support, but this proved not to be the case. He
eventually found him in Steffins’s hut, the recently injured,
club-footed young man. They sat inside playing a board game. MO-126
did his sleepy dog act and laid in the shade by the back wall.

“I’ve got you beat, Ranex. Do you want to
give up now or should we play it out?” Steffin said in a tone of
good-natured teasing.

“No,” Ranex said and laughed. “I know when
I’m outmatched.”

Speaking of which, what are you doing here?
Shouldn’t you be out trying to get the family elders to support you
as headman?”

“I don’t see the point. They all know me,
and they all know Movey. They’ll make their decisions.”

His statement surprised the android dog
listening outside. Movey may have discovered politics, but it did
not sound as if Ranex had.

“Maybe, but when?” Steffin asked. “The
village needs a headman to, well, you know, to resolve disputes,
meet with the Master Traders, and make final decisions, and stuff.
Shouldn’t you go see them and get them to meet to do that?”

“Actually, I expect Movey will. He really
wants to be headman.”

“And you don’t?”

“Not really. I imagine it can be a pain.
Dunwood used to complain about it all time.”

“Yeah, I heard him once say that if he had
to listen one more time to Winnie complaining about Tibber stealing
honey from her beehives, he was going to strangle her.”

“And the funny thing is, he wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“Taking any honey. Tibber has a secret honey
tree in the woods. He showed it to me once. He had no reason to
take hers. Besides, he’s afraid of her. I don’t blame him. I
wouldn’t want to get into an argument with her if I could avoid
it.”

“If you become headman, you probably won’t
be able to. She’s always complaining about something.”

Ranex sighed. “I know.”

“So why don’t you just let Movey be the new
headman?”

“I don’t think he’d make a good one. He’s
too, well, I’m not sure of the word, but he always seems to be
looking at how people can do something for him rather than just
looking at them like people.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Steffin said.
“He doesn’t like me much, I know. It’s probably because I can’t do
anything for him.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Ranex said. “You
could probably teach him some humility by constantly beating him at
jump disc like you have me.”

Steffin chuckled. “I don’t think he plays,
and I’m not sure I’d like his company if he did.

“Why’s that?”

“He strikes me as the type that would try to
cheat.”

Ranex laughed, but based on what MO-126
overheard from Movey earlier, he agreed with Steffin. Some people
would do anything to win. The android dog found this difficult to
understand. He felt that cheating to win a game would make the
victory meaningless. Perhaps some humans were simply not
intelligent enough to realize this. They were primitives, after
all.

~*~

Three days later, the family elders met near
the river in an area surrounded by standing stones, each about
three meters tall. The current villager’s ancestors built them at
some point in the last few thousand years. Humans erected similar
things in other villages. It seemed that wherever a handy source of
stone could be found nearby, a stone circle of some kind would
eventually be made, especially in places with hard winters because
the primitives could use ice to help them break and move the rocks
to more esthetically pleasing shapes and locations. Some of the
circles were quite large with impressive trilithons and huge altar
stones. Others were little more than rings of roughly shaped
boulders. MO-126 wondered why the primitives went through all the
trouble. The circles were considerably difficult to construct using
only stone tools to chisel the monoliths into their final shapes
and with nothing but muscles, logs, and ropes to place them
upright, but the primitives took considerable pride in them.
Sometimes, the circles were considered holy, or lucky, or just a
place to gather for celebrations involving fermented beverages and
group mating rituals. The primitives in this village considered the
circle the place of their ancestors, and they used the area for
cremations and other ceremonies.

The meeting was not secret. Everyone in the
village knew where and when it would take place, but only the
family elders were allowed to attend. Men who were senior but not
elders formed a cordon around the area to ensure that no other
villagers came near. This exclusion did not extend to a simple dog,
and no one objected to MO-126’s presence just outside the stone
circle.

Forty-two men representing the village’s
extended families stood in their finest linen tunics listening to
the current elder of the last headman’s family, a bent-backed old
man with a gray beard and clouded eyes, standing behind an altar
stone.

“My nephew departed us without leaving a
successor,” the bearded man began in a croaked voice. “Two men have
stepped forward to take on the duty, Movey and Ranex. You all know
them, and each of them has support from several families. This has
only happened once before in the spoken memory of our people. At
that time, according to legends told by the fires, the new headman
was chosen by a tally of the family elders. It is for this reason
that we are gathered here today.”

Without a clear successor, the village
descended into a form of democracy, which might be a fine system
for an enlightened population, but MO-126 held doubts about how it
would work for a group of Neolithic illiterates. They lacked a
procedure for weighing their available choices with respect to any
objective criteria. They could not examine records, present
evidence, nor have the candidates’ ideas on various subjects
debated by experts in the applicable disciplines. All they could do
is take a vote to determine which candidate currently enjoyed the
greatest popularity, which is a fickle thing. It is easily swayed,
even in a well-informed society.

“Each of you has been given two small clay
disks,” the old man went on, “one marked with a circle and one
marked with a square. If your family wishes to have Movey as the
new headman, put your token with a square in the jar.” He lifted a
narrow-mouthed clay jar on the stone slab and shook it noiselessly
to prove it was currently empty. “If Ranex is your choice, drop the
token with the circle. I will collect the tokens you did not drop
as you pass. When all have made their choice, you will watch as I
lay out the tokens to see which of the two men has more.”

Lining tokens was a common way to determine
relative quantities. The counting system used in most villages
included names for numbers up to somewhere between seven and
twelve. Anything greater than this they normally just considered
‘many.’

“Let us begin.”

A line formed with no apparent direction
from anyone. MO-126 observed people do this before and concluded
from it that humans possessed some kind of queuing instinct. It
might be a carryover from their early mammalian evolution going
back to when the number of small mouths could exceed the number of
available teats.

The men approached the altar stone and
dropped their tokens with an audible clunk. It took them less then
ten minutes. The elder ostensibly in charge of the gathering
emptied the jar and began making two parallel lines of tokens, one
row for the squares and one for the circles. When he placed the
last stone, the conclusion became clear. There were two more circle
tokens than square ones. Ranex had won.