An Android Dog's Tale (25 page)

She turned her head to the dog standing
quietly a short distance away. “What are you looking at?” she said
to him. Her blonde brows arched over pale-blue eyes.

He never could get the hang of observing
people without appearing that he was, unless he concentrated on it,
which he had not been. The way she posed her question did not sound
like she objected to his presence. In fact, it sounded simply
conversational, as if she expected him to understand and would not
be especially surprised if he answered.

He adjusted his sensors to confirm that she
was human. She was, or at least she exhibited the right kind of
heartbeat and other life signs.

“I’ve got no food, if that’s what you’re
looking for,” she said. “But if you don’t mind being seen with the
village crazy woman, I don’t mind the company.” She patted the sand
next to her.

That explained it. She was crazy. But she
couldn’t be too crazy because if she was, she wouldn’t know it.
MO-126 witnessed all kinds of crazy over his twelve thousand years
of, for lack of a better word, life. He never took time to
categorize them, but the range ran from screaming, homicidal
maniacs who saw little qualitative difference between rocks and
people and hated them all, to abnormally introspective recluses who
saw little qualitative difference between rocks and people and
found them all fascinating. Those at both frayed ends of the rope
of reality did not appreciate that their grip on it might be a bit
loose. The quietly-sitting-alone-and-talking-to-yourself type of
crazy person did not normally present cause for concern, especially
if he, or in this case, she realized they were a bit odd, which
this one obviously did.

He moved closer and sat beside her. She
petted his head.

“I’ve got a bit of a mystery here, doggy,”
she said, returning her attention to the bowl. “It’s probably not
to you, of course.”

She put her hand in the bowl and gave the
thing inside a twist. A sliver of stone threaded on a bit of tree
bark floated and spun on a shallow pool of water.

“You’re lucky you’re a dog. Eat, sleep, make
puppies. Anything not connected to one of those probably doesn’t
interest you much, does it? If it did, the dogs around you would
probably think you were fairly clever rather than thinking you were
strange, too, I bet. It’s different with people, but I’m sure you
know that.”

The spinning assembly came to a stop in the
bowl with the sliver of rock pointing out toward the sea at about a
ninety degree angle to the coastline.

“See,” she said. “It always does that, every
time, no matter where I do it. It always points the same way. Most
rocks don’t do that, or much of anything else, as far as I’ve ever
seen.”

She spun it again. When it came to rest, it
aligned itself as before.

“Don’t you think that’s strange?” she said.
She patted him on the head again. “Well, of course you don’t, but I
certainly do. What do you suppose causes that?”

The young woman could not possibly know much
about lodestones or anything about magnetic fields, but she could
see that something odd was happening, and she wanted to find out
why.

She stood, brushed sand from her stained
tunic, and collected her bowl.

“Come on. Let’s try it closer to the
water.”

She seemed to expect him to follow, so he
did. He found her strange in an interesting way. He liked that in a
person.

Three barefoot village girls splashing in
the surf giggled as they approached. One of them pointed at
MO-126.

“Is that who you’re going to marry,
Payshia?” she said. All three of them laughed as if they somehow
found this funny. “Bella said you’d never get a boyfriend, but I
told her there must be some dog-ugly man desperate enough. Looks
like I was right.”

The girl with the bowl, Payshia, apparently,
stopped and turned around. “I think it might be best to try this
someplace else,” she said either to herself or to the dog next to
her but clearly not to the three girls. She did not even look in
their direction.

Her tormenter, unwilling to be ignored,
blocked Payshia’s attempted tactical retreat. She was outnumbered
by inferior forces. The android dog suspected that something like
this condition might apply to humanity in general.

“I asked you a question,” the girl said. She
held her shapely arms crossed over her shapelier bosom.

Payshia, a bit taller but far less busty,
attempted to walk around her antagonist, but the other two girls
blocked her way.

“Why don’t you tell us?” one of them said.
“We promise not to steal him away from you.”

This prompted another round of laughter.

Payshia eyed the three girls. Judging by her
heart rate, she felt nervous, but only sad resignation showed in
her eyes.

“
MO-126, it’s time to go.
” The call
from Tam should not have come as the surprise that it, in fact,
did. The trader must have concluded his business here a while
ago.

“
I’ll be with you in a few minutes,
”
the android dog signaled.

“Tell us. Tell us.” The three girls
chanted.

“He’s not my boyfriend. He’s just a friend,”
Payshia said. She did not say ‘just a dog,’ MO-126 noticed, which
is probably what most people would have said. He appreciated that
she did not.

“So why don’t you marry him?” the third girl
said.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” Payshia
said. She should have stopped there, but a contemplative look came
over her and she continued. “I expect you don’t because you are all
fairly stupid and insecure, and you are trying to make yourselves
feel better by picking on people who are not.”

“What?” The ringleader of the band said. It
was more of a challenge than a question, but Payshia replied.

“I’m sorry. I tried not to use any big
words.”

“Words! I’ll give you words.” The girl
paused, found she had none to offer, and instead pushed Payshia’s
comparatively planar chest with both hands. Hard.

Payshia fell, dropping her bowl. The girls
confronting her drew back shapely legs to add their input to the
debate.

A low, rumbling growl in the ancient dialect
of gray wolves, which, until now, MO-126 did not realize lay buried
deep in his firmware, caught their attention. The girls stopped in
mid kick. One wobbled for a moment, lost her balance, and fell in
the sand.

He took a slow step toward the first girl.
Fur bristled. White fangs gleamed. Anyone paying attention would
have sworn that his eyes glowed with a demonic red flame for a
brief second. This was just a side effect of his infrared scanner
being activated, but it provided the desired result.

The girls beat a speedy escape in three-part
screaming harmony. He watched until he felt confident they would
not turn around and then went to fetch Payshia’s dropped bowl.

When he returned, he dropped it in her lap.
She gave him a hug from where she sat, seemingly unperturbed by her
recent experience.

“Thanks, doggy. I can’t seem to get them to
stop teasing me. They never kick very hard, but I’d rather they
didn’t do it at all. I think I upset them because, well, it’s like,
I’m different, you know. They have this idea of the way things
should be, what’s important, and I don’t fit in because I kind of
see things a different way. That makes them nervous. To be honest,
it kind of makes me nervous, too, because I don’t really know where
I’m going. They do. They can see their whole lives ahead of them,
and they say they’re happy about it, you know, getting a husband,
having children, and all that, but I’m not sure they really are.
Personally, I think it’s kind of depressing. Nothing ever really
changes. We’re just doing what everyone else has done, thinking the
same thoughts, dreaming the same dreams, and if we have children,
they’ll do the same. Same story, different faces until the end of
time. Know what I mean? What’s the point in that? I mean, okay,
maybe I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know I can’t get there
standing still, and that’s what we’re all doing. We’re just running
in place.”

MO-126 listened attentively, cocking his
head from side to side as she spoke.

She smiled at him and gave him an
affectionate scratch behind an ear. “I know none of that makes
sense to you, but thanks for listening.”

She might not be the most articulate speaker
he ever heard. She did not have a trade android’s way with words,
but for a verbalized idea, which, after all, she believed she was
really only telling to herself, it was pretty good. He thought he
knew what she meant.

She retrieved her bowl and looked inside.
The water had spilled out, but the sliver of lodestone on its tiny
bark float was there. MO-126 made sure of that. He got a fair
amount of sand in his mouth trying to pick it up.

“Thanks for saving my experiment. I haven’t
figured out how it works, yet.”

She probably never would. Despite her
obvious intelligence and inquisitive nature, developing a theory of
electromagnetism was probably far beyond her. It would not stop her
from trying, and perhaps one of her descendants might someday
understand it.

“
MO-126, what’s keeping you?
”

“
I’ll be there in a minute, Tam,
” he
said.

“
Hurry up.
”

Payshia stood. “Sometimes I almost wish I
could be a dog,” she said. “It must be nice. Uncomplicated.” She
turned the bowl in her hands contemplatively. “Except for the lack
of thumbs, maybe. I think I’d miss thumbs.”

You got that right, kid, MO-126 thought.

“I think it might be a good idea to go home
now. What about you, doggy? Do you have a home?”

“Woof,” he said. He had a place, anyway,
like a cog in a machine, but it was the place he was made to fill.
He could not honestly call it a home.

She marched away from the sandy shore and
MO-126 walked beside her while he determined the location of his
partner. His signal put him about half a kilometer outside of
town.

“Woof,” he said again. This was Dog for
‘Good luck.’ She’d need it. He briefly considered going with her,
but that would create problems for both of them. He ran to find
Tam.

~*~

“
What kept you,
” the trade android
asked a short time later. He stood in a field of weeds, waiting
impatiently, when the android dog found him.

“
I was just checking things out, like I
should. What about you? How did your negotiations with the village
leader go?
”

“
They didn’t. Not anywhere useful,
anyway. I’ve never been to a village that didn’t want to do some
trade. I even offered to bring copper, and you know how seldom we
do that. They insisted they were doing fine on their own and asked
me to leave. Two primitives showed me the way. Politely, of course,
but it was as close to a threat as I’ve ever seen. I’m sure they’re
trying to hide something
.”

“
They’re probably just being, um,
independent. What could they possibly have to hide? And why would
they want to hide it from you?
”

“
We know they’re in contact with other
villages. Maybe they’ve heard something about us that makes them
suspicious.
”

“
I can’t imagine what that would be,
”
MO-126 said.

“
Me either. Our trades are always more
than generous.
”

From one perspective, this was absolutely
true. But from another, the traders’ goods might be seen as having
unwelcome side effects, and MO-126 wondered what the primitives
here thought those were.

“
What about you?
” Tam said. “
Did
you see anyone using coins?
”

“
What? Oh, yes. They seem to be using
them to trade among themselves.
” He decided not to
elaborate.

“
What else did you see? You were gone a
long time.
”

MO-126 recalled the phonetic alphabet, the
abacus, and Payshia’s experimentation with what could easily be the
first magnetic compass discovered by humans. All of them would be
seen as serious faults by Field Ops, but to the people here, they
meant progress. They could make their future different than their
past.

Screw the bonus.

“
Nothing worth reporting,
” he said.
“
I just saw people doing what people do.
”

1,010 Years Later

(Galactic Standard Year 242246)

(Project Year 18693)

In which some things end and others
begin.

I
t took only a few
weeks to decommission the project that ran for over eighteen
thousand years. A lot of the preliminary work was done earlier, of
course. The PM decided on the termination date over two and half
centuries ago. They knew this day would come, and they prepared for
it. Humanity’s disturbing, perhaps instinctive need for change led
people to make innovations that put the corporation’s guarantee of
purity at risk, and the output of one project planet was not worth
the possibility of tainting the image of their brand name.
Canceling the project now, in fact, strengthened it by reaffirming
the corporation’s commitment to quality.

MO-126 and Tam paused on the bank of a fast
moving mountain stream, waiting as the stony doorway of Hub
Terminal Ten lowered like a drawbridge. It settled over the
burbling water with a heavy, ominous thud. Once it rested firmly in
place, they led the gond pulling their last wagonload of produce
inside the cave-like entrance.

“
Are you sure about this?
” Tam asked
as the door closed behind them. “
You can leave with the rest of
us. Even if you don’t want to continue working for the corporation,
I’m sure you can find a job somewhere, especially if you get an
upgrade—maybe those thumbs you’ve always wanted. Or tentacles, or
whatever. Some species even use prehensile noses or tongues. There
are lots of options. Something must suit you. I’m sure you have
enough credits banked. You’ve been saving, and you’ve been here
longer than I have.
”