An Android Dog's Tale

by D.L. Morrese

  ~*~

  One day, he came upon a little village in the eastern half of the continent that seemed so sleepy he almost believed he could hear it snoring. It occupied a bit of undistinguished flat land a bit closer to Hub Terminal Ten than to Hub Terminal Four, which still put it in the middle of nowhere. No roads worthy of the name led to it, and no rivers navigable by anything larger than a canoe or small raft flowed nearby. It seemed like a good place to get away from it all.

  He approached the collection of thatched, wattle and daub buildings cautiously. He learned long ago that one never can tell with humans. They might welcome him; they might ignore him; they might try to hunt him down to make him the main course of a feast. As with most such places, the village dogs noticed his arrival first, or at least they were the first to do anything about it. He knew the routine. They barked from a distance and postured with bristled fur and bared teeth. He dipped his head submissively and allowed their approach.

  After a round of wary sniffing, they allowed him to continue. A couple of them persisted in trying to engage him in the canine equivalent of idle conversation, which, to a human, might look more like play. He tried to ignore them. They eventually abandoned their boring visitor and returned to the important tasks they interrupted before he arrived, which mainly consisted of sleeping in shady spots and occasionally scratching or licking themselves, processes that apparently demanded careful attention. MO-126 never could understand why.

  An old man sitting on a spindle-backed rocking chair outside one of the huts, gummed a piece of overripe fruit he sliced with a short, bronze knife. He glanced toward the android dog and squinted nearsightedly before returning his attention to his sweet snack.

  A boy who could not have been older than ten years ran to the old man on bare feet, his dusty and frayed tunic fluttering behind him.

  “Gumper!” the boy said. “Your gond is doing it again.”

  “Confound it,” the man said, slowly rising from his chair. He reached for a wooden staff leaning against the wall of the hut. “Where’s Beaty? Why didn’t you tell him?”

  “I…I couldn’t find him. He said he had to go take care of something and left me to watch the sheep. I thought he was just going off to take a leak, but he was gone a long time, and he didn’t answer when I called.”

  “Probably went courting that girl again,” Gumper grumbled. “He’s almost as bad as the gond. Come on. Let’s see what we can do.”

  They rushed off as quickly as the old man could move. The situation mildly tickled MO-126’s curiosity, and, having nothing better to do, he followed behind them.

  The old man and the boy soon arrived at a fenced pasture enclosing about an acre of stubby grass and weeds. A flock of seven sheep inside nervously attempted to evade the overtures of a clearly amorous bull gond, which must have gotten in through a break in the fence. It probably knocked it down just for this purpose. It would not have done so with anything resembling planning, of course. Gonds simply tended to ignore obstacles when their tiny minds became set on something. It may not have even noticed a fence in the way.

  “Stupid beast. If I didn’t need him to pull the plow, I’d have Beaty turn him into boot leather.”

  “If we don’t do something, he’s going to turn those sheep into mutton,” the boy said with some urgency.

  MO-126 observed such behavior in gonds several times before. The old man was right. They were stupid beasts. People sometimes remarked on the stupidity of goats and sheep, but they were geniuses compared to gonds. Even chickens, which could claim little with regard to higher intellect, could reason better than gonds. They could count their own chicks, up to a limit, anyway. As the largest native land animals, and with no natural enemies, gonds never needed to be smart. Their survival required just two basic instincts—eat and breed, both of which they normally did in a fairly persistent but unhurried manner. Throughout the course of their evolution, this sufficed. Until the introduction of species from the human home world, it was all they ever needed. Their quadruple stomachs could digest just about any plant growing on the planet. Any reasonably large animal with four legs that they could catch was probably another gond, and there was at least a fifty percent chance of it being of the opposite gender. Since embarrassment also did not appear on their short list of evolutionary endowments, this was not an issue. Gonds never needed to be overly discriminate in their choices of meals and mates, so they weren’t.

  Once the Corporation project began, however, additional four-legged beasts occupied the planet, and sometimes problems arose. An especially nearsighted or enthusiastic gond, perhaps sensing hormones or some other clue, would occasionally attempt to engage in natural acts with unnatural and unwilling partners. Corporation biologists discovered that immature gonds secreted a scent that adults did not, which males of the species seemed to respect as a sign that they were not suitable companions for romantic advances. The imported livestock lacked this protection.

  The one ram in the flock feinted a challenge to the gond by lowering its head and stamping a foreleg. This only seemed to encourage the gond. After all, it massed about the same as the entire flock. A ram presented no threat, and the gond might have even seen the display as the wooly ruminant’s equivalent of a ‘come hither’ look.

  The sheep’s flocking instinct kept them together, which would have been fine if a pack of wild dogs threatened them. It failed to effectively address the danger posed by a single gond with a horny gleam in its dull eyes plodding their way. By ill luck or random chance, they ended up huddled in one end of the fenced enclosure. A gate stood there, but it was closed, and the gond had them cornered.

  “Open the gate!” the old man yelled. “Let them out.”

  “But they’ll run away,” the boy protested. “And the gond will just chase them anyway.”

  “It can’t catch them in the open. Hurry! We can worry about them later. Right now, we just have to get them out of there.”

  The barefooted boy ran to obey.

  MO-126 thought he might be able to help. He ran into the small pasture through the break in the fence, barking and dodging around the gond to distract it. This might give the boy, and the sheep, a little more time.

  After running close enough to smell the well-chewed grass on its breath, he managed to catch the gond’s attention. It turned its wide, hairy head toward him, farted, and stopped its slow advance on the cornered sheep. The android dog noticed the boy fumbling with the gate latch. MO-126 backed away slowly so that the gond could keep its eyes on him, otherwise, it might forget he was there.

  The boy finally got the gate open, and the sheep ran for it. This was enough to distract the gond again. It turned its attention to its fleeing connubial interest and began following them through the open gate. The boy could do nothing to stop it, and he didn’t attempt to. Instead, he tried, and failed, to keep up with the sheep, which ran as a flock in a straight line away from the pursuing gond.

  MO-126 ran past the gond and the boy. He could at least keep the sheep together and herd them back once the two humans found a way to subdue the large and misguided paramour.

  After the sheep covered what he considered a safe enough distance, he circled around them to get them to stop, which he managed quite well, he thought. When he looked back to the fenced pasture, he saw the old man hitting the gond with his staff. The minor amount of pain he might be inflicting on its thick hide was just to distract the animal. Gonds tended to follow the path of least resistance, rather like water—or most people, for that matter. With the sheep away from its nearsighted view, it apparently decided that complying with the old man’s prompting was the easiest thing to do, so it acquiesced and allowed itself to be guided away.

  The barefoot boy came huffing toward MO-126 and the flock he tended. The sheep by this time were taking an interest in the nice fresh grass around them, which is, after all, always greener on the other side of the fence. The android dog sat near them, trying to look helpful, or at least not dangerous. H
e’d let the stupid-looking kid make the first overture. And he was stupid-looking. His upswept ears were a bit too big and stuck out just enough to make his head, which was a little too small, appear that it was about to take flight. His greenish eyes and blondish hair were both unremarkable traits in the eastern half of the continent, and two front teeth that any rodent would be proud of protruded over his lower lip. The android dog observed hundreds of people much like him over the years. They seldom amounted to much and were destined to lead quiet, dull lives among others who were much the same. He rather envied them at times.

  “Um,” said the boy eloquently.

  “Woof,” replied the android dog.

  Some of the sheep turned their wooly attention to him for a moment, saw he wasn’t moving or even looking at them in a threatening way, and then went back to their grass salads.

  “Thanks for herding them away, Doggy. I need to take them home now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Woof,” MO-126 said again. He didn’t mind at all, but the boy would probably need help. The android dog rose to all four feet slowly so as not to frighten the skittish sheep or the sheepish boy.

  The stupid-looking kid spread his arms and tried urging the sheep back toward their enclosure. They ignored him, for the most part, seemingly reluctant to leave their new found grazing spot. The android dog barked sharply and darted toward them. This got them moving. Now, it was just a matter of getting them to go in the right direction. This also provided few problems, and soon the boy closed the gate behind them. The matter of the broken fence was also being tended to. The old man returned with a younger one, and they began making temporary repairs with rope and tree branches. It wasn’t much of a fence, but it should suffice to deter sheep. The gond stood complacently tethered to a tree some distance away.

  “Good job,” the man said to the stupid-looking kid. “I thought getting them back might take all day. Where did that sheepdog come from?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said. “He just showed up.”

  “Hmm. Well, if no one claims him, I’ll take him. He seems useful.”

  MO-126 considered the offer and rejected it by taking a step closer to the boy, all the while glaring at the old man and growling softly.

  “Um, I think he wants to stay with me, Gumper,” the boy said.

  The old man eyed the android dog with a bemused expression. “Yes, I see that. Well, just as well, but I’m not going to pay you any more because you have a dog, hear? Same as before, one copper coin a week for watching the sheep and doing odd jobs.”

  “That’s fine,” the boy agreed.

  “Off you go now. You can come back tomorrow. Bring the dog, if he’s still with you.”

  The boy nodded and ran back to the main part of the village. MO-126 went with him to the small hut he shared with his grandmother, or an old woman he called ‘Granny,’ in any case. The boy’s presumed grandmother called him Kolby. Only the two of them lived in the small, four-room house. They never mentioned any other family.

  Kolby wanted to bring his new dog inside that day, but his grandmother protested, so MO-126 stayed outside and went with the boy the next morning to watch Gumper’s sheep. He learned later that the old man was his grandmother’s cousin, and the other man, Beaty, was Gumper’s son.

  The next day proved much the same as the one before, as did the day after that and the day after that for several weeks. MO-126 was not quite sure why he stayed, but he found the sameness of each day, the stability of the village, and the simplicity of the people living here restful. Eventually, Granny warmed to him and allowed him in the house. The rabbit he brought them for dinner that night may have helped.

  The string of days gradually became a velvet chain of years that comfortably tied him to the first place he ever truly thought of as home.