An Android Dog's Tale

by D.L. Morrese

  ~*~

  About an hour and half later, he saw sheep grazing on the next hill. He raced around to the front of his tiny flock and managed, with some difficulty, to stop them. They must have sensed the other sheep and wished to rejoin them because they kept trying to continue walking in that direction.

  “I’m here,” he sent to Tork. “I’ve got the sheep less than half a kilometer east of the village. I think they want to come home now.”

  “Not yet. Stay there. I need you to make some kind of noise that the primitives here in the village can hear. Bark or howl or something. Try to make it distinctive so I can tell them I recognize the call as meaning you need me to come to you.”

  “It seems unnecessarily complicated, but I’m sure you have a good reason for this. One emergency dog signal coming up.”

  He thought for a moment, cleared his throat, and yelled, “Ruff, ruff, ruff, howlllllllllll.”

  Unexpectedly, the villagers’ dogs responded. Soon, howling came from several different spots in and around the village. The cacophony made him feel like the leader of the pack. He enjoyed it, so he did it again. “Ruff, ruff, howlllllll!”

  “That’s enough. You can stop now. We’re coming,” the trade android signaled.

  “Are you sure? How about a few more just so they don’t suspect I know you heard me?”

  He raised his head and yelled, “Ruff. Ruff. Hooowwwllllll!” The harmonizing from the village dogs grew louder. The sheep seemed unappreciative and largely uninterested, although the large male with them tried to baa along. It lost the tune quickly and went back to grazing.

  He found the canine chorus oddly appealing. It did not have a beat or a melody, but there was a simple, basic beauty to it, a kind of an a cappella atonal symphony. He did not know if he was the composer, or the conductor, or just one of the instruments. Probably all and none of those labels applied in one way or another, and he closed his eyes to get in touch with his inner dog.

  A distinctively bipedal induced rustle in the grass drew his attention. He opened his eyes and saw Tork. With him were the village headman, Gault, and his sister, Ryenne.

  “Woof,” MO-126 said by way of a greeting.

  “It appears as if my dog has found your wayward sheep, Gault,” Tork said to the headman.

  “I see that,” said the smiling village leader. “I’m relieved and very pleased.”

  MO-126 wagged his tail, expecting an appreciative pat on the head at any moment.

  “No, you’re not,” said his sister.

  The android dog’s tail froze mid-wag.

  “I’m not?” Gault asked. His brow furled in bemusement.

  “No. You’re not.” She eyed the sheep suspiciously and then cast an accusatory gaze upon MO-126.

  “I know the gods speak to you, Ryenne, but I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about this,” Gault said. “These are good sheep, and they have three healthy lambs with them. I am quite happy to have them.” As well he should be. In a society in which money did not exist, sheep represented wealth.

  “No. You’re not,” she said again. “You should be afraid. You should be very afraid.”

  “Of three sheep and three new lambs?” the headman asked.

  “They’re not lambs,” she said ominously.

  “Of course they’re lambs, Ryenne,” Gault said. “Look at them. They’re small; they’re wooly; they each have four legs, and they’re sucking on sheep teats. That’s pretty much the definition of lambs.”

  The holy woman shook her head in denial. “They only look like lambs. You’re forgetting Mov’s chicken.”

  The village headman cocked his head with bemusement, but he apparently spotted the direction of her thoughts because he soon caught her meaning. He knew her all her life and must have witnessed many of her twisted journeys into the lands of invisible nightmares and bizarre imaginings. He asked for confirmation anyway.

  “You’re saying those lambs are demons?”

  “Of course they’re demons!” She rolled her eyes with exasperation at the stupidity of her older brother. “The ewes were possessed before they gave birth, so the demons were spawned in the unborn lambs, just like in Mov’s chicken. These are stronger creatures—strong enough to carry a demon, so they survived. We need to kill them all, now, and then burn them before they can carry their demonic seed to others.”

  “She’s bat-crap crazy,” MO-126 said silently to his partner.

  “Well, she is especially imaginative,” the android trader replied. “From her perspective, I’m sure it all seems quite reasonable.”

  “Her perspective is from a high mountain with too little oxygen in mystical la-la land.”

  “You’re being unreasonably judgmental. She’s a primitive.”

  “She’s still crazy,” the artificial dog said.

  “Oddly enough, I think her brother is considering that possibility, too.”

  The trader’s comment may have been prompted by the fact that Gault just told her that she was being unreasonable. Three sheep and three new lambs were not things to be dispensed with needlessly.

  “Better these six than all our flock,” she told him.

  “But how can we know for sure?” Gault protested. “They don’t appear possessed to me.”

  “I already know for sure, Gault. The gods speak to me, remember?”

  “Well, yes. But how can I know for sure?”

  “Don’t be stupid. You can know because I told you.”

  Whereas this might have been sufficient explanation for him to allow an old woman to be beaten and starved, quite possibly to death, it did not provide a strong enough reason to sacrifice six sheep. He cautiously approached the small flock MO-126 continued to watch over. The three adult sheep glanced at the village headman, perhaps recognizing him as their owner. The lambs stayed by their mothers, completely failing to do anything overtly demonic.

  “They look like normal lambs to me, Ryenne,” Gault called back to his sister. She did not accompany him to examine the demon animals.

  “That’s what they want you to think,” she said from a safe distance. “I can feel the evil in them from here.”

  Gault reached out to pet one of the lambs. Its mother let him. The lamb bleated, “Maaa,” and stuck out its tongue. It was not forked. There were no visible fangs. It did not vomit pea soup or twist its head around. It did have strange, horizontal pupils, but all sheep had those.

  “I think this one is all right,” the village headman said. He examined the other two and then the adult sheep. “I think they’re all fine. Your demons must have left.”

  “They’re not my demons! They’re here because of Galinda. And how would you know, anyway? You’ve never been able to hear the voices or see the visions. I can feel the demons in them, I tell you. They’re there. Get away from them before they call one into you, too!”

  The android dog cocked his head, desperately trying to see things from her perspective, and failing. Dogs, as a rule, have less imagination than humans do, and their manufactured likenesses shared this trait. They just saw things that were really there and did not feel compelled to invent stories to explain them. In this case, he felt both of the humans were wrong. They were Ryenne’s demons, and they were still alive and well. They just were not what or where they thought they were.

  The headman took a step back at her warning and then looked at his sister, and then at his sheep, and then at his sister again. MO-126 did not know the village headman well, but he seemed a pragmatic sort. His analytical expression made the android dog suspect that he was mentally comparing the relative of value of six healthy sheep to that of one deranged woman.

  Gault approached the sheep again and examined them more thoroughly, despite his sister’s continued cautions. If Tork understood the primitives’ worldview as well as he implied, Ryenne’s inner visions would be as real to Gault as the images his own eyes revealed. Possibly better because he only saw the surface of things while she saw the spirits beneath. This added to the
fact that the sheep were just sheep and she was family led MO-126 to suspect that both the sheep and the old woman back in the village would not live much longer.

  The headman reached his decision. “The sheep are fine, Ryenne. They’re coming back with us.”

  On the other hand, sheep are valuable, and once dead, they stay dead. There remained some chance his sister would come to her senses.

  “Oh, no. Now the demons have you, too,” she whimpered. She turned to Master Trader Tork and clutched the sleeve of his tunic. “You must stop him,” she pleaded.

  The trade android patted her shoulder benignly the way a nursery android might comfort a small child. “Why?” he asked.

  She searched his artificial eyes, which gazed back at her with apparent innocence. A look of confusion froze on her face until he smiled at her.

  She screamed and snatched the obsidian dagger he wore at his hip. “You, too!” she yelled, pushing away and holding the sharp, black point toward him.

  “Calm down, Ryenne,” her brother called. “There is no need for this.”

  She swiveled and pointed the dagger toward her brother. “No. Stay away!”

  He slowed but continued to approach. The sheep followed him.

  MO-126 growled softly, fearing she might try to stab her brother. His reaction ultimately resulted from routines embedded deep in his firmware, but it signaled a legitimate warning nonetheless.

  She shifted her attention briefly to the threatening dog. Her eyes grew ever wider as she switched her focus from him, to her brother, to the trader, and then to the sheep. She screamed again, turned, and ran toward the village.