by John Scalzi
From deep inside the black tunnel, Wilson heard a very small, echoing bark.
“Okay, good news,” Wilson said. “The dog’s still alive. Bad news: The dog is still alive somewhere down a very small, dark tunnel.”
“Can you go down the tunnel?” Schmidt asked.
Wilson looked and then felt around the wall of the capsule. “How does our groundskeeper friend feel about me tearing into the plant wall a little bit?” he asked.
“He says that in the wild these plants have to deal with wild animals kicking and tearing at their insides all the time, so you’re not going to hurt it too much,” Schmidt said. “Just don’t tear it any more than you have to.”
“Got it,” Wilson said. “Also, Hart, do me a favor and throw me down a light, please.”
“The only light I have is on my PDA,” Schmidt said.
“Ask the groundskeeper,” Wilson said.
Down the tunnel, there was a sudden, surprised yelp.
“Ask him to hurry, please,” Wilson said.
A couple minutes later, the mouth of the plant opened and a small object tumbled down into the capsule. Wilson retrieved the light, switched it on, lifted the tear and shone the light down the tunnel, sweeping it around to get an idea of its dimensions. He figured if he crawled, he might barely be able to make his way down the tunnel. The tunnel itself was long enough that the light shone down into darkness.
“I’m going to have to undo the rope,” Wilson said. “It’s not long enough to go all the way down this tunnel.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Schmidt said.
“Being swallowed by a carnivorous plant isn’t a good idea,” Wilson said, undoing the rope. “Compared to that, letting go of the rope is nothing.”
“What if you get lost down there?” Schmidt asked.
“My BrainPal will let you know where I am, and I’ll let you know if I get stuck,” Wilson said. “You’ll be able to tell by the screaming panic in my voice.”
“Okay,” Schmidt said. “Also, I don’t know if this is information that you need to know right now, but I just got a ping from Ambassador Waverly’s assistant. She says the negotiations should wrap up in an hour and then the ambassador will want Tuffy for, and I swear to God this is a quote, ‘a little snuggle time.’”
“Wonderful,” Wilson said. “Well, at least now we know how much time we have.”
“One hour,” Schmidt said. “Happy spelunking. Try not to die.”
“Right,” Wilson said. He knelt at the tear, tore it just enough to shove his body through, put the light between his teeth, got on his hands and knees and started crawling.
The first hundred meters were the easy part; the tunnel was narrow and low, but dry and relatively straight as it descended through the rock. Wilson figured that if he had to guess, he’d venture it was once a lava tube at some point, but at the moment all he really wanted was for the thing not to collapse on him. He wasn’t ordinarily claustrophobic, but he’d also never been dozens of meters down a tube in a rock, either. He thought he was allowed a spot of unease.
After a hundred meters or so, the tube became slightly wider and higher but also more jagged and twisting, and the angle of descent became substantially steeper. Wilson hoped that somewhere along the way the tunnel might become wide enough for him to turn around in; he didn’t like the idea of having to back out ass first, dragging the dog along with him.
“How is it going?” Schmidt asked him.
“Come down here and find out,” Wilson said, around his light. Schmidt demurred.
Every twenty meters or so Wilson would call out to Tuffy, who would bark some times but not others. After close to an hour of crawling, the barks finally began to sound like they were getting closer. After almost exactly an hour, Wilson could hear two things: Schmidt beginning to sweat up on the surface and the scrabbling sounds of a creature moving some distance ahead.
The tunnel suddenly widened and then disappeared into blackness. Wilson carefully approached what was now the lip of the tunnel, took the light out of his mouth and panned it around.
The cave was about ten meters long, four or five meters wide and roughly five meters deep. To the side of the tunnel lip was a pile of scree that formed a steep slope to the floor of the cave; directly in front of the lip, however, was a straight drop. Wilson’s light played across the scree and caught glimpses of dusty paw marks; Tuffy had avoided the drop.
Wilson directed the light to the floor cave, calling out to the dog as he did so. The dog didn’t bark, but Wilson heard the clitter of nails on the floor. Suddenly Tuffy was in the light cone, eyes reflecting green up at Wilson.
“There you are, you little pain in the ass,” Wilson said. The dog was dusty but otherwise seemed unharmed by his little adventure. He had something in his jaws; Wilson peered closely. It looked like a bone of some sort. Apparently, Tuffy wasn’t the first live animal to get sucked down into the fleur du roi after all; something else fell in and escaped down the tunnel behind the tear, just to die in this dead-end cave.
Tuffy got bored of looking into the light and turned to wander off. As he did, Wilson caught a glimpse of something sparkly attached to the dog; he trained his light on the animal as it moved and focused on the sparkly bit. Whatever it was was stuck to Tuffy in some way, encircling one of the dog’s shoulders and riding around to his undercarriage.
“What the hell is that?” Wilson said to himself. He was still following Tuffy with the light, which was why he finally saw the skeleton of the creature the dog had taken his chew toy from. The skeleton was roughly a meter and a half long and mostly intact; it was missing what looked like a rib—which was what Tuffy was now chewing on quite contentedly—and its head. Wilson flicked the light slightly and caught the white flash of something round. Ah, thought Wilson. There’s the head, then.
It took him a few seconds to realize that what he was looking at was the skeleton of an Icheloe adult.
It took another few seconds, and Tuffy wandering through the light cone, sparkling as he did so, before Wilson realized which Icheloe’s skeleton it was likely to be.
“Oh, shit,” Wilson said, out loud.
“Harry?” Schmidt said, suddenly cutting in. “Uh, just so you know, I’m not alone on this end anymore. And we have a bit of a problem here.”
“We have a bit of a problem on this end, too, Hart,” Wilson said.
“I’m guessing your problem isn’t Ambassador Waverly looking for her dog,” Schmidt said.
“No,” Wilson said. “It’s oh so very much larger.”
There was an indignant squawk on the other end of the line; Wilson imagined Schmidt putting his hand over the PDA’s microphone to keep Wilson from hearing ambassadorial venting. “Is it Tuffy? Is Tuffy all right?” More squawking. “Is Tuffy, uh, alive?”
“Tuffy is fine, Tuffy is alive, Tuffy is perfectly good,” Wilson said. “But I’ve found something down here that’s none of those things.”
“What do you mean?” Schmidt said.
“Hart,” Wilson said, “I’m pretty sure I just found the lost king.”
* * *
“Do you hear that?” Ambassador Waverly said, pointing out the window of one of the many sitting rooms of the royal palace. The window was open, and in the distance was a rhythmic chittering that reminded Wilson of the cicadas that would fill the midwestern nights with their white noise. These were not cicadas.
“Those are protesters,” Waverly said. “Thousands of Icheloe reactionaries who are here to demand a return to royalty.” She pointed at Wilson. “You did that. More than a year of background work and persuasion and angling to get us a seat at the table—more than a year to line up the dominoes just right for us to position this negotiation as the first step to make a legitimate counter to the Conclave—and you blow it all in two hours. Congratulations, Lieutenant Wilson.”
“Wilson didn’t intend to find the lost king, Philippa,” Ambassador Abumwe said, to her counterpart. She was in
the room with Wilson and Waverly. Schmidt was there, too, pulled in because he was, as Waverly put it, an “accomplice” to Wilson’s shenanigans. Tuffy was also present, gnawing on a toy ball volunteered by the palace staff. Wilson had discreetly separated Tuffy from the royal bones long before they both had exited the cave. The crown remained with the dog; it had somehow attached itself and refused to be removed. All five were awaiting the return of Praetor Gunztar, who had been pulled into emergency consultations.
“It doesn’t matter what he intended to do,” Waverly shot back. “What matters is what he did do. And what he did was single-handedly disrupt a long-running diplomatic process. Now the Icheloe are back on the verge of civil war and we are to blame.”
“It doesn’t have to be as bad as that,” Abumwe said. “If nothing else, we’ve solved the disappearance of the king, which was the cause of the civil war. The war started because one faction blamed the other for kidnapping and killing him. Now we know that never happened.”
“And that simply doesn’t matter,” Waverly said. “You know as well as I that the disappearance of the king was just the polite fiction the factions needed to go after each other with guns and knives. If it hadn’t been the king going missing, they would have found some other reason to go at each other’s throats. What’s important now is that they wanted to end that fight.” Waverly pointed again at Wilson. “But now he’s dragged up that damn king, giving the hard-liners on both sides a new pointless excuse to go after each other.”
“We don’t know that will be the outcome,” Abumwe said. “You had confidence in the process before. At the end of the day, the Icheloe still want their peace.”
“But will they still want it with us?” Waverly said, looking over. “Now that we’ve unnecessarily disrupted their peace process and added complications to it? That’s the question. I hope you’re right, Ode. I really do. But I have my doubts.” She turned her gaze back to Wilson. “And do you have any thoughts on this subject, Lieutenant Wilson?”
Wilson glanced over to Abumwe, whose face was neutral, and at Schmidt, who had preemptively gone pale. “I’m sorry I unnecessarily disrupted your process, Ambassador,” he said. “I apologize.” In his peripheral vision, Wilson could see Schmidt’s eyes widen. Hart clearly wasn’t expecting deference from his friend.
“You apologize,” Waverly said, walking over to him. “You’re sorry. That’s all you have to say.”
“Yes, I think so, ma’am,” Wilson said. “Unless you think there’s something else I should add.”
“I think your resignation would be in order,” Waverly said.
Wilson smiled at this. “The Colonial Defense Forces isn’t generally keen on resignations, Ambassador Waverly.”
“And that’s your final comment on the matter,” Waverly said, persisting.
Wilson glanced very briefly at Abumwe and caught her almost imperceptible shrug. “Well, except to say that I know what to do the next time something like this happens,” he said.
“And what is that?” Waverly said.
“Let the plant keep the dog,” Wilson said.
Praetor Gunztar opened the door to the room before Waverly had a chance to explode at Wilson. She whirled toward Gunztar instead with such sudden ferocity that even the praetor, who was no great reader of human emotion, could not miss it. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Of course, Praetor Gunztar,” Waverly said, tightly.
“Very good,” Gunztar said, barreling through before Waverly could launch into anything further. “I have news. Some of it is good. Some of it is less so.”
“All right,” Waverly said.
“The good news—the great news—is that leaders of both factions agree that no one was responsible for the killing of the king, except for the king himself,” Gunztar said. “It was well-known the king was a heavy drinker and that he would often stroll in his private garden at night. The most obvious explanation is that the king was drunk, collapsed into the kingsflower planter, and the plant pulled him under. When he awoke, he tried to escape and followed the tunnel to his death. The garden was part of his private residence and he was a bachelor; no one looked for him until his staff went to wake him in the morning.”
“Didn’t anyone at the time think to look inside the plant?” Abumwe asked.
“They did, of course,” Gunztar said. “But it was not until much later, when more obvious places were searched. And by that time, there was no trace of the king. It seems that he may have wandered down the tunnel by that time and was either dead or too injured by the fall into the cave to call for help. The bones show his spine was shattered in several places, consistent with a fall.”
Wilson, who remembered Tuffy chewing on at least a couple of other bones aside from the rib, kept quiet.
“This is good news because one continual sticking point between the factions has been finding some way to finesse the disappearance of the king,” Gunztar said. “The question of blame and responsibility are still sore subjects. Or were. Now they no longer are. During our discussions, the head of the pro-king faction provisionally apologized for blaming the agitators for killing the king. The head of the agitator faction provisionally expressed sorrow at the death of the king. As long as it sticks, the job here has become substantially easier.”
“Wow,” Wilson said. “And here I thought that the disappearance of the king was just a convenient excuse already warring factions were using to go after each other.”
“Of course not,” Gunztar said, turning toward Wilson and thereby missing the flush that drove itself up Waverly’s neck and face. “To be certain, the factions were ready to fight. But our civil war would not have lasted so long, nor have been so bloody, had one side not accused the other of regicide. And so the Icheloe owe you a particular debt of thanks, Lieutenant Wilson, for what you have done for us today.”
“If you thank anyone, you should thank Ambassador Waverly, Praetor Gunztar,” Wilson said. “Without her, I would never have found your lost king. After all, she is the one who brought Tuffy.”
“Yes, of course,” Gunztar said, bowing in the Icheloe way to Ambassador Waverly. She, still furious at Wilson and yet also aware of how he had just transferred credit for the praise to her, nodded mutely. “And that, I’m afraid, brings us to our bad news.”
“What’s the bad news?” Waverly said.
“It’s about Tuffy,” Gunztar said. “The crown is attached to him.”
“Yes,” Waverly said. “It’s tangled in his hair. We’ll get it out. We’ll trim his hair down if we have to.”
“It’s not that simple,” Gunztar said. “You can’t get it off him because it’s tangled in his hair. You can’t get it off him because microscopic fibers have come off the crown and physically attached themselves to him, binding the crown to his physical body.”
“What?” Waverly said.
“The crown is permanently attached to Tuffy,” Gunztar said. “The scans our medical scientists did when he was brought back to the surface show it.”
“How could that possibly happen?” Abumwe asked.
“The crown is a very important symbol of the king,” Gunztar said. “Once taken up, it was supposed to never be taken off.” He pointed to a set of ridges on his own head. “The crown is designed to sit on the head of the king in such a way that it need never be removed. To assure that it never is, it is made with nanobiotic strands on the inside surface, tuned to graft to the genetic signature of the king. The crown is also sensitive to the electrical signals produced by life. It only comes off at death, when all brain and body activity are quiet.”
“How did it get attached to Tuffy?” Waverly said. “He obviously has no genetic relation to your king.”
“It’s a mystery to us as much as you,” Gunztar said.
“Hmmmm,” Wilson said.
“What is it, Wilson?” Abumwe said.
“How much of this genetic material would need to be present for the crown to register it?” Wilson said.
“You’d have to ask our scientists,” Gunztar said. “Why?”
Wilson motioned to Tuffy, who had dozed off. “When I found him, he was chewing on one of the king’s bones,” he said. “He’d been in and around that skeleton for at least an hour. More than enough time to get some of the king’s genetic material all over him. If the crown wasn’t programmed well, it might have registered the genetic material, registered electrical signals from Tuffy being alive and decided, ‘Well, close enough.’”
“So we give Tuffy a bath, wash off all the king’s, uh, dust, and the crown lets go,” Schmidt said. “Right?”
Wilson looked over at Gunztar, who offered up a negative gesture. “No. Only death will cause the crown to let go,” he said. He turned to Ambassador Waverly. “And the council, I’m afraid, is adamant that the crown must be removed.”
Waverly looked blankly at Gunztar for the ten seconds or so it took for what the praetor said to sink in. Wilson glanced over to Schmidt and Abumwe as if to say, Here it comes.
“You want to kill my dog?!” Waverly exclaimed to Gunztar.
Gunztar immediately threw up his hands. “We don’t want to kill Tuffy,” he said, quickly. “But you must understand, my friend. The crown is an object of truly immense historical, political and social value. It is no exaggeration to say that it is one of the most iconic and significant objects we Icheloe have. It’s been missing for generations. Its importance to us is incalculable. And your dog is wearing it.”
“It’s not his fault,” Waverly said.
“I agree, of course,” Gunztar said. “But ultimately that is neither here nor there. The council is unanimous that the crown must not stay on your dog.” He pointed out the window, toward the chittering masses gathered in front of the palace. “The reactionaries we have at the gate don’t represent our people at large, but there are enough of them to cause trouble. If they were to find out a pet wore the crown of the disappeared king, the riots would last for days. And I would be lying to you if I said there weren’t those on the council who didn’t find the fact Tuffy wears the crown deeply insulting. One of them even began calling him ‘the Dog King.’ And not in an affectionate way.”