by D.L. Morrese
~*~
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 becom
ing much more.