An Android Dog's Tale (23 page)

“I want no harm to come to Ronny,” Ned
said.

“You know we don’t do that.”

“No, I suppose you don’t. Corporation
protocols. But denying the trade is going to have consequences.
Isn’t there something else you can do?”

“The standard mitigation strategy for
situations like this clearly applies. I must follow
procedures.”

“Don’t give me that—”

“My job here is to mitigate the fault as
efficiently as possible,” Tam interrupted. “What the primitives do
is not my concern unless it is likely to harm the project. I don’t
see that happening here.”

“I’ll keep an eye on Ronny,” Ned’s partner,
Moby, said.

That won’t be enough, MO-126 thought. If the
villagers decided to take out their frustration on the young man,
one android dog won’t be able to protect him without compromising
himself.

~*~

Word spread quickly in the small village. So
did the fire. It started late that night in the tallying shed. Then
it spread to a nearby chicken coop, one of several scattered
seemingly at random throughout the village, where it consumed a
meal of hay and one slow hen. From there, it made its way to an
even smaller shed containing barrels and jars of fish oil.

Everyone in the village was already awake
when the stored oil violently erupted in flame, raining fiery
droplets onto the wood-shingled roof of the citrus barn. Tam and
MO-126 stood at the edge of the unfolding mayhem as people grabbed
buckets and did their best to save what they could. The storyteller
android was among them.

While Moby watched Ronny, he himself ought
to have been watching the shed, MO-126 thought. He should have
known that this was where the villagers would vent their
frustration. Oh, they might be angry at their new Numbers-Keeper.
Call him names, maybe even push him around a little, inflict a few
bruises, perhaps, but he seemed a likeable young man. Everyone here
knew him. It wasn’t a large enough place for strangers. He was one
of their own, with a mother and father who must be nice people in
their own right to raise a son like that. But the shed with the
offensive clay tablets wasn’t alive. It had no family. And now, it
was fast becoming nothing but a possible source of charcoal.

“MO-126, It’s Moby, I mean, MO-72. There’s a
group of men here at Ronny’s place—with torches. Tell Tam to find
Sydon and get down here.”

Then again, there were always some. The mad
dog kind of humans whose normal reaction to stress was to
metaphorically bite someone—and their granny, no matter how nice
she might be.

He relayed the message to his partner, homed
in on Moby’s location, and ran.

~*~

Torches waved in the darkness outside one of
the hovels near the shore. MO-126 activated his infrared vision and
saw three men being held at bay by Moby. The storyteller’s partner
growled and snapped as he tried to keep the men from the small,
thatch-roofed building.

MO-126 ran to help, barking loudly.

“
Don’t attack them,
” Moby said.
“
Just keep them away from the hut.
”

MO-126 recalled his previous efforts at
sheep herding. This couldn’t be much different, except that these
creatures possessed half as many legs, carried torches, and held
claim to a bit more intelligence, which they apparently were not
using much at the moment. The part of the human brain that
controlled rational behavior was the last to evolve and the easiest
to shut down. People seemed to do it often. On the whole, he liked
people and considered them quite clever, but some seemed to use
their brains primarily just to keep their eyeballs from falling
in.

“
Can do. Any particular direction you
want them to go?
”

“
Other than away, no.
”

The two artificial dogs snapped and dodged.
At first, the men backed away at this renewed challenge, but they
called out to one another and spread out to try to find a way past
them, perhaps a bit more purposefully than before.

“Lloyd, you go to the left. Kurt, you go to
the right. I’ll take the middle,” one of the men shouted. The
tactic would have worked better if the two dogs did not understand
every word he said. Moby cut to one side and MO-126 the other in an
attempt to keep the men bunched closer together.

Anger drove the men, and they would not
retreat. MO-126 only hoped they could keep them at bay until Sydon,
the village headman, arrived with Tam.

“Woof?” MO-126 said. Dog communication is a
heavily context dependent form of expression. A simple ‘woof’ can
mean many different things. Much depends on the situation. In this
case, it meant something along the lines of ‘Oops’ or ‘Oh, shit!’
depending on who might be nearby. He misjudged the intentions of
one of the men who feinted left, cut right, and scurried toward the
hut, drawing back his arm to toss a torch into the thatch.

The android dog pivoted and leapt, catching
the offending arm on the backswing. The man screamed, dropped the
torch, and shook his arm, trying to detach the jaws clamped to
it.

MO-126 released him and grabbed the fallen
torch in his teeth. With a quick jerk of his head he flung it a
good distance toward the beach and growled at the wild-eyed man
backing away and nervously pointing at him.

“Did you…did you…did you see what it did?”
he yelled. “I swear that dog is some kind of demon.”

“
That wasn’t very subtle,
” Tam
said.

MO-126 peered into the darkness and saw his
partner approaching with the village headman.

“Woof?” he said with the same meaning as
before. The android dog hadn’t thought about his actions. He just
reacted. Now, he needed to find a rational explanation. After a
second of reflection, he said, “
They think the Traders are a bit
magical, anyway. It only stands to reason that their dogs would be
a bit, well, extraordinary, right?
”

“
You threw that torch almost ten
meters.
”

“
Okay. So maybe a lot extraordinary. Even
better. Helps build the mystique.
”

“What’s going on here? Sydon yelled. “Ernie!
Is that you? What are you doing?”

The man recently deprived of his torch
froze. His two associates turned to run but found their way blocked
by a large, growling mouth full of angry teeth. Moby stood behind
them.

“Lloyd! Kurt! I know that’s you.” This
required no special visual acuity. The torches the men held
provided the major source of light nearby, and mostly they
illuminated the faces of the men holding them.

“Ronny cost us a year’s worth of work with
his stupid scratch marks,” Ernie yelled. “He’s got to be
punished.”

Sydon marched toward him. “What he did, he
did with my approval. How were we supposed to know about the
invisible things the Master Trader talked about? Besides, you were
all for it at the Elders meeting, as I recall. You thought your
family brought in more fruit than most others, and that that wasn’t
fair. Remember?”

“But, I…I…,” Ernie began before righteous
indignation returned. “But we know now, and we’ve taken care of it.
The marks are gone. The trader can take the fruit, right? We fixed
it.”

Sydon’s eyes smoldered in the torchlight.
“You! Of course. You set fire to the tallying shed. Yeah, the
tablets are probably gone, but so are at least one chicken coop and
the fish oil stores. I’m not sure yet about the citrus barn, but
the roof was smoking when I left.”

“What? We didn’t—”

“Fire spreads, you idiot!”

“I…I’m sorry. I didn’t know. We never
meant—”

“All three of you, get back to the village
and help put the fires out. You’re just lucky no one was hurt. I’ll
talk to you more in the morning.”

The three men ran to comply. By this time,
Ronny and an old woman were peeking out of the door of their hut.
The village headman and Tam joined them.

“You can come out now,” Sydon said.

“I’m sorry,” Ronny said. “I only wanted to
help.” The young man bowed his head in shame. The old woman put her
arm around him.

“It’s not his fault,” she said. “He—”

“It’s all right, Mum,” Ronny said. “But it
is my fault. It was my silly idea that caused all of this.”

“It’s not your fault, and it wasn’t a silly
idea. It was a good idea.” She glared at Tam. “I heard about what
you said, Master Trader, and if there are any silly ideas
responsible for this, it was yours. Orange spirits? Hah!”

Tam went into mitigation mode. “There are
mysteries you simply cannot understand. We try to protect you from
them.”

“I may not know as much about some things as
you,” she said poking him in the chest, “but I do know this; the
things that are most dangerous are things you don’t
understand.”

“There are things it is safer not to know
about at all, things that should not be poked at.” He glanced down
at the finger still prodding his chest, which she withdrew. “Some
things are like bee nests. They’re best left alone.”

“There’s honey in a bee’s nest, Trader. You
just have to know about bees to get it.”

“
She’s got you there,
” MO-126 said to
him. He could not help admiring the old woman. She exhibited signs
of having a good mind and a spiky attitude.

Tam ignored him. “That knowledge was passed
down to you by your ancestors. That is my point. The old ways are
old because they work. They are ways you should respect and
follow.”

“If all you do is what you’ve already done,
you never learn anything new,” she countered.

“I see nothing wrong with that. Your lives
are good.”

“I think they could be better. Or maybe our
children’s can. I don’t know, and that’s the real point. I don’t
know, but I think it’s important to try to find out.”

“And if you don’t like what you find?”

“Then we’ll know, won’t we?”

“If you survive.”

Tam turned away and strode toward the main
part of the village and the smoldering ruins of the tallying
shed.

“
Humans!” he said to his partner. “Why do
they have to be so difficult? The corporation has given them a
place to live ideally suited for their species, a mild climate, few
predators, and some of the most expensive and sought after food in
the galaxy.
”

“
That’s only because they produce it, and
they don’t know it’s the most expensive food in the galaxy or any
of that other stuff, do they
?” MO-126 said.

“
No. They don’t, and they’d be better off
if they never find out.
”

MO-126 glanced back at the hut where Sydon
remained talking with Ronny and his mother. In the distance, small
fishing boats with their crude, square sails furled, waited in the
sand for another day. They were little more than rowboats, but the
android dog expected they would soon be on their way to becoming
much more.

~*~

The shed smoldered sadly as the sun appeared
over the horizon. The villagers, tired, sooty, and smelling of
smoke, worked all night to keep the fires from spreading. The
citrus barn survived along with its contents, which villagers now
loaded into the trader’s wagon.

“Thank you for agreeing to this trade,
Trader Tam,” Sydon said.

“I’m only doing it because I feel somewhat
responsible for what happened here,” the trade android grumbled.
“The fruit is still worthless, but I can dispose of it for
you.”

Both statements were lies. The fruit were
undamaged, and the only thing most trade androids felt responsible
for was doing their part to keep the project going. MO-126, Moby,
and Ned worked on him a long time before he finally gave in. Ned
argued that the villagers learned their lesson and that this
corrected the fault. They could leave the trade goods under
corporate protocols for disaster relief, so he may as well take the
valuable fruit in his empty wagon.

Sydon did not argue and promised that their
experiment with the clay tablets was over. They would return to
their traditional ways.

MO-126 wandered over to what remained of the
tallying shed, now little but charred wood and broken clay.

“
It seems like such a waste,
” he said
to his partner.

“
Not at all,
” Tam replied. “
This
has been a very successful mitigation. And we’ve managed to salvage
the fruit.
”

This is not what the android dog meant at
all, but he decided it would be best not to correct him.

2,806 Years Later

(Galactic Standard Year 241236)

(Project Year 17683)

In which choices are made and something is
overlooked.

C
orporation
mitigation actions could delay the spread of trade between
primitive villages, but they could not prevent it. A limited amount
went on along rivers and coastlines for more than two thousand
years now, the result of ventures of the few chronically
dissatisfied humans who could be found in any group, the ones who
did not seem to appreciate how good they had it. To the
bewilderment of many Corporation androids, some primitives unwisely
risked everything they owned and most of what they knew to peek
under rocks and over hills. They set out on long treks to explore
strange new places, seek out new experiences, and blindly go where
none of them had gone before.

On a less hospitable planet, this could
easily remove them from the gene pool, but here, they enjoyed a
reasonably benign environment by design, so they tended to survive,
and sometimes they found other people. When they did, one of the
things they did was trade. If the primitives limited this to goods,
it would not be a serious concern. But they did not. They also
traded ideas. So far, the interactions were limited, and they only
occurred between neighboring populations, but a recently reported
fault could allow them to expand. The village MO-126 and his
partner headed toward had developed a concept of money, and the
people there were trading with at least one other village farther
down the coast.