But Rui-Lian's stories always ended in triumph, and Genius Bunny's didn't. Yee could identify.
* * * *
The failed first-aid class had left Yee grouchy, as usual. She decided to make a phone call. First, she closed her door and sealed it. Her tiny bedroom contained a full-length mirror, which over the course of the past year had revealed a dourer and dourer Yee.
She called Lizzy Srisai at Azzura Station, on the Half-Cracked Continent. Srisai was the most senior biologist on Myosotis, and her five-year hitch was nearly up.
Bunnies occupied all eight continents. Archaeologists did not agree how this had been achieved, except that it was an accident. The medstations were distributed among bunny settlements, and their routes were designed to bring every bunny in range of medical treatment several times a year. Allowing contact between humans was not a requirement.
Half of the stations were currently staffed by Bengali speakers and half by English speakers. Earthservice had originally tried sending qualified xenobiologists regardless of their language background. Only two of the original team could talk to each other, and that was in schoolbook Latin. There had been suicides. One of the Latin speakers had traveled a thousand kilometers to assault the other one. Earthservice changed the policy.
Yee was considering learning Bengali just so she'd have more people to talk to. Besides the bunnies.
Srisai offered the usual sympathy with Yee's woes. “Have I told you the story about the bunny I taught to apply analgesics?” she said. Yee smiled. Of course she had heard the story several times, but right now she just wanted to have a conversation at an adult human level. It didn't have to be novel.
Apollo, the bunny, had learned to do a few basic tasks under Srisai's supervision and her scrupulous avoidance of the word if. “Differential diagnosis was always the stumbling block,” said Srisai. To look at a case of thebba-leaf poisoning and realize it wasn't geriatric gastric inflammation, you had to be able to imagine something not present. That ability had always eluded Apollo, who was now dead of geriatric gastric inflammation.
Yee kept the conversation short. After she and Srisai had said their good-byes, she stuck her head out the door and shouted, “Does anyone want to talk on the phone?” Of course they always did.
Kairians disapproved of using advanced technologies on a client world without giving the native population a chance to share. With a last check of her bedroom door—evacuating a bunny from the medstation was a nontrivial task—Yee flipped the phone into bunnymode so it would shut off when they'd used it as long as she had.
She opened the door. Her Earthmix air would smell a little odd to the bunnies, but shouldn't do them any harm in the—she glanced at the timer—eighteen minutes they'd be inside.
A bunny she called Izzy lumbered up to the viewscreen. Onscreen, another bunny nodded vigorously.
“It's raining,” said the remote bunny.
“No, it's not,” said Izzy.
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it's not.”
“Would you like to mate?”
“Okay.”
The onscreen bunny pressed its chest up against the screen. Srisai was giggling uncontrollably. At Yee's end, Izzy did its best. Yee turned away. Explaining to the bunnies why this wouldn't work was a lost cause. Earthservice had settled for making the screens sturdy and easy to clean.
Yee wandered outside and sat on the grass. In the distance, tall blue fronds waved and sang in sweet harmonies. The orrum trees raised their orange bulbs high like an armful of sunsets. The grass wiggled.
What appeared to be a lavender flower on a blue stalk nuzzled Yee's ankle. The flower was actually a mouth. With more ambition than sense, it was trying to devour her, but lacking teeth or tongue it could only tickle. It was, in its alien way, cute. Then a bunny hopped over and ate it.
Myosotis is such a beautiful planet, she thought, except for being full of bunnies.
* * * *
When Yee had decided on a xenobiology career, she had imagined Coalition work as an interstellar Peace Corps. She would dive beneath methane oceans in her Earthservice-issue envirosuit uniform to teach glowing globular Therakass how to program their first computer and ditch their circular slide rules. She would fly on a collapsible harness among the Dwala and explain strong cryptography. She would disseminate bioengineered toxophages with the slithering photosynthetic Orsho. Maybe she'd publish the occasional academic work in xenobiology, or give interviews to the popular press on alien cultures and diplomacy.
But she'd been assigned to the Myosotian protectorate instead, to look after a race that was never going to develop FTL on its own and qualify for full Coalition membership. Medical care was the only technology the bunnies could benefit from. They did not need energy sources, pollution clean-up, or FTL. They toiled not, neither did they spin.
And they weren't intelligent enough to treat themselves. That's where Yee came in. She, along with the biologists scattered among the Myosotis medstations, looked after their fellow client race. In return humanity got an improved FTL technology that made the Slominski drive look like a four-stroke engine.
And all the scientific work on the bunnies had already been done by the Kairians back when humans were still trying to figure out how to keep thieves out of their pyramids.
According to Kairian archaeologists, bunnies’ ancestors were a large herbivorous species. Their sheer size and groups discouraged most predators. Only one had ever been large enough to pose a threat. Bunnytongue no longer had a word for it. Humans called it the elmer.
Bunnies seemed to have begun to build stone walls as protection from the elmers. Language ability left no hard parts to fossilize, of course, but a pre-existing communicative system—perhaps used for warnings or when food was discovered—had probably developed into proto-bunnytongue, and bunnies who could talk could better organize defenses. Archaeologists had found clubs and even spears, invented by some bunny Oppenheimer. Armed with these tools, the bunnies had defended themselves against the elmers until the elmers were extinct.
The elmers had been gone for millennia before the Kairians had come to call, but the conflict had left its mark. What the first Kairians on Myosotis had taken as religious practice, the burial of the dead at the ends of the stone walls and the extension of the walls over the graves, seemed to be instinctive: a way to deprive the elmers of their kills. Bunnies would flee unthinkingly—even more unthinkingly than usual—from a shape that suggested an elmer. The human biologists sometimes took advantage of this for emergency crowd control.
Az-Zarqaa’ Station had tried an elmer suit. Bunnies, it turned out, could still make clubs. Now the biologists used a projector.
Yee wasn't going to say it would have been a good thing if elmers were still eating bunnies, not publicly, but in the long run it might have been better than the alternative. With the end of competition, bunny evolution ceased.
Bunnies didn't even compete with each other for territory. Egg fertilization and implantation rates decreased as population density increased. The population would grow to what the environment would support, then stop. A wonderful solution for individual bunnies, who only invested resources in offspring that were likely to survive, but it also eliminated the one other possible source of evolutionary pressure.
* * * *
After the phone call had ended it took Yee nearly an hour to shoo the bunnies out of the medstation and ten minutes to squeegee off the viewscreen to her satisfaction. She celebrated with a lukewarm shower in her bedroom.
When she came out to take the evening air, Genius Bunny had reappeared and was approaching a vrith not known to Yee.
“Will you mate with me?” said Genius Bunny with a syncopated bounce Yee could not help interpreting as hope.
“No.”
“Mate with me.”
“I don't want to mate with you.”
“Genius Bunny, come inside,” said Yee. Maybe she could give it a lesson on the dummy. It was probably just as muc
h of a waste of time as the last lesson, but at least it wasted time for a different reason, since Genius Bunny might learn something.
Genius Bunny ambled inside. It still had that orrum rind in its hand and was dribbling spore pouches on the clean floor. Yee decided she didn't care.
Yee slid the dummy out of its wall niche, but Genius Bunny wasn't paying attention. It was leaning over to stare intently at—oh, hell, she'd left the bedroom door open. She could have smacked herself.
Genius Bunny squeezed through the bedroom door so that the reflection was at the favored bunny focal distance. It held the rind up in front of the mirror and took out a black rock.
That must be what had made Flora so angry. Genius Bunny had figured out a way to win the copycat game every time—even if its opponent had an orrum rind of its own, it couldn't predict what Genius Bunny was going to pull out of it. It was the bunny equivalent of discovering a new forced mate in chess. No doubt Genius Bunny had expected this to make the game more fun and was surprised to find its inspiration rewarded with cuffs.
And now, Yee supposed, it had found an opponent that wouldn't be angry—but couldn't be beaten. Since she couldn't squeeze into her room and get a shot of ethyl alcohol with artificial lemon flavor, she consoled herself with a long drink of distilled water from the dispenser.
But when she finished, Genius Bunny was backing out of her room and looking at her—not the mirror.
“Nobody can see what's in the orrum rind,” said Genius Bunny in Rui-Lian Ducrot's voice. “Nobody can know what's in the orrum rind. Nobody can take out the same color. It took out the same color. That's not a bunny. That's me.”
Yee had just witnessed the bunny equivalent of Cogito ergo sum. The thought made everything that much more depressing. She let Genius Bunny outside, then went in her room for that drink.
* * * *
She decided to watch the sunset and came out just in time to see Genius Bunny getting rejected by Izzy for the second time in one day. Genius Bunny bounced off to eat some ferns. Yee decided to interrogate Izzy a little.
“Why didn't you mate with Genius Bunny?” she asked.
“I don't like Genius Bunny.”
“I like Genius Bunny.”
Izzy scratched the back of its neck with its thumb claw. “Did you mate with Genius Bunny?”
“No.”
“I like you.”
“You don't want to mate with me.”
“You're not stong.” That was the least disturbing possible response, now that she considered it.
Genius Bunny probably wasn't a mutant. It was at the high end of bunny variation, not a quantum leap forward. Bunny evolution may have been in equilibrium, but Genius Bunny wasn't about to punctuate it. If only it wasn't suffering the same fate as so many of its Earth counterparts—if only it could get laid, and pass on that nice collection of genes to its offspring—
Yee, for the first time in her career, recalled an offhand reference from a froglike (though human) biology prof whose lectures had heretofore been useless to her. It gave her a wonderful, awful idea.
She was so excited she was tempted to snap on the ansible and try to reach a former classmate who might have the exact reference, but resisted. The FTL comm channel was for Kairian-approved business only, and it's not as though there was anyone offworld who wanted to talk to a bunny afterward, or vice versa. She searched the electronic library instead. Eventually she found the article she wanted.
Now for the forbidden experiment. She could hardly wait.
* * * *
Yee unrolled the largest sheet of synthflesh on the worktable and cut out a meter-long leaf shape with a pointed tip and squared-off bottom. It seemed a little floppy, so she reinforced it along the back with a thin length of splint that extended about ten centimeters past the square end. She gazed upon her creation, and saw that it was good, so she made a second one. Finally she masked off the bases and sprayed them on both sides with fixative so that only the bottom three centimeters were reactive.
She lay awake in her bed all night, unsleeping, drumming her fingers, staring at the ceiling, waiting for dawn.
* * * *
Genius Bunny was its usual affable self. Yee was suitably impressed. She certainly wouldn't have been at her best if an alien with a flashlight had awakened her at sunup and ushered her into a hospital room.
“Lean forward for me,” she said. It did, puzzled, she thought, by the untranslatable “for me.” She gently applied the synthflesh to its ears, with a few supplementary strips along the splint to hold each of them in place. The tips of the prosthetic ears brushed the ceiling. To her, the results looked fine: a bunny with unusually long ears. For all she knew, though, other bunnies would find the effect grotesque. She had one last test, and it wasn't a very good one. She opened the bedroom door.
Genius Bunny looked in the mirror for a long time. It retracted and extended its thumb claws, it rocked from side to side. Yee was not sure how to read that emotion. At last, it spoke.
“If I were vrith, I would mate with me.”
* * * *
Yee nervously held her finger on the projector button. What worked with Earth birds might not work with bunnies.
Generations ago, a pre-Kairian zoologist, Malte Andersson, had studied the widowbird—a Kenyan bird with such extreme sexual dimorphism that males’ tails were twice the length of their bodies. Andersson had snipped off some of those tails and pasted them onto those of other male widowbirds, with results never before seen by female widowbirds—who preferred the enhanced males to normal ones by a factor of two to one. Size did matter—and you could improve on what Mother Nature had to offer.
Yee didn't know how the bunnies would take to a similar imposture. She hated to risk Genius Bunny for it—but at least she had a backup plan: the projector, the tranquilizer, the self-cauterizing scalpel.
* * * *
“I can't believe I'm hearing this,” said Srisai. “You're saying you performed a cosmetic medical procedure, without informed consent, on a bunny?”
“I doubt you can get an objection out of it.” Yee glanced at the viewscreen. Genius Bunny was lying happily on its back, paddling its hind legs in the air, exhausted. “We should edit its entry in the translation database and change its name to Playboy.”
“I don't even know how many rules this violates.”
“Want me to ship Genius Bunny to you? It should make a tour of all the stations. It could be the first sex tourist on Myosotis.”
“You need to take a long deep breath.”
“I'm going to take a long deep drink instead.” Yee slugged down a third shot of lemon alcohol. Another happy thought occurred to her. “The counterfactual! Did I tell you what it said? ‘If I were vrith, I'd mate with me.'”
“There's no word for ‘if’ in bunnytongue—wait, I get it. From the translator, right? We say ‘if,’ and the translator always handles it the same way.”
“I'm so proud. I'm going to train it to be a doctor. And all the smart little baby bunnies, too. In a couple of years we'll be starting the Genius Bunny School of Myosotian Medicine.” She snapped the phone off. With the vaguest sense that she was overlooking something, she fell asleep on the bed.
* * * *
Something buzzed Yee awake. Not the door—the communicator in the other room was going off. She couldn't have been asleep that long; she wasn't quite sober. She stumbled out to take the call.
That red light—the ansible was on. An offworld call. She looked back over her shoulder, smoothed her hair, and switched on the viewscreen.
Her caller was something few humans ever saw. Most of its body was a flattened white cylinder, flexed into an arc. The carapace was open at the end and a knot of many-jointed black fingers extended to work what must have been Kairian comm controls. The glossy round red braincase was at the center of the screen. The writhing black tube extending from the braincase served as sensory and communication organ. Its tip writhed and a fine mist sprayed out.
“Mavi Station. This is Akolani Lee.”
“Ms. Yee,” said the speaker. Kairian speech was usually described as “warbling"; the audio output must be coming from a computer. Kairian machine translation was, unsurprisingly, excellent. “This is Margaret Abraham Whetu Zukisa Cheong-Chi Rowtag of the Coalition of Planets.
“Ms. Srisai contacted us on the ansible to report your recent actions.” Bitch, thought Yee groggily. “She stated that you have performed an experimental procedure on a Myosotian without said Myosotian's consent. She further stated that you did this with the belief that said Myosotian might be exposed to danger as a result of the procedure—again, without said Myosotian's consent. She said this was done in an attempt to manipulate said Myosotian's mating potential.”
“Said Myosotian is named Genius Bunny. I can get its Myosotian name from the translation database.” Yee was not moved to deference. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
“I have not finished reading the charges. Your medstation logs show that you used a long-distance communication device without allowing the Myosotians to use it as well. Ms. Srisai stated that you performed all of these discouraged acts, except the last, in order to achieve a long-term change in the Myosotian gene pool. This is a strongly discouraged act.”
“It's true,” said Yee. It occurred to her that she didn't have a will. She wondered if she owned anything that her brother and sister would consider worth fighting over. On the bright side, she supposed that she had found a way to get out of four more years of bunny service.
“In keeping with Coalition recommendations, I remind you that Coalition members have never experimented on humans, have never deliberately exposed humans to increased risks, and have never permitted technology introduction and application teams on Earth to use technologies without sharing them with humans. Furthermore, Coalition members have not engaged in selective breeding of humans, except for that incident in Dallas, and the team involved was immediately and thoroughly discouraged.”
Analog SFF, October 2008 Page 12