The Good New Stuff

THE RETURN OF THE KANGAROO REX

Janet Kagan made her first short fiction sale in 1989, but has rapidly built a large and enthusiastic audience for her work, and has become a figure of note in the nineties. Although her debt to earlier writers of the offworld adventure tale, particularly James H. Schmitz (on whose work she is something of an authority, having contributed the introduction for the collection The Best of James H. Schmitz), is clear, she quickly developed a characteristic and flavorful voice of her own, and always brings her own quirky and individual perspective to whatever she’s writing about, here breathing new life into the Exploring-a-Frontier-Planet story, a subgenre most commentators would have thought to be played out decades before. In fact, her linked series of stories about Mama Jason, of which “The Return of the Kangaroo Rex” is an example, later collected in book form as Mirabile, has proved to be one of the most popular series to run in Asimov’s Science Fiction in recent years, with several of the stories winning the Asimov’s Reader’s Award Poll by large margins. Her first novel, a Star Trek novel called Uhura’s Song was a nationwide bestseller, and her second novel Hellspark (not a Star Trek novel) was also widely acclaimed, and has been recently reissued. She is a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has also sold to Analog, Pulphouse, and Absolute Magnitude. Her story “The Nutcracker Coup” won her a Hugo Award in 1993. She lives in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, with her husband, Ricky, several computers, and lots of cats, and is at work on a new novel.

In the wry and suspenseful story that follows, she takes us along to the frontier planet Mirabile to meet a woman whose job it is to cope with some very dangerous and very odd creatures, and follows her as she unravels a compelling biological mystery.

I’d been staring at the monitor so long all the genes were beginning to look alike to me. They shouldn’t have, of course—this gene-read was native Mirabilan, so it was a whole new kettle of fish.

That’s an American Guild expression, but it’s the right one. At a casual look, had the critter been Earth-based, we’d have classed it as fish and left it at that. The problem was that it had taken a liking to our rice crop, and, if we didn’t do something quick, nobody on Mirabile’d see a chow fun noodle ever again. So I went back to staring, trying to force those genes into patterns the team and I could cope with.

Moving the rice fields didn’t guarantee we’d find a place free of them. In the first place, it encysted in dry ground, meaning you never knew where it’d pop up until you flooded the area. In the second place, it could leap like a salmon from the first place to the second place. It had already demonstrated its ability to spread from one field to the next. Susan had measured a twelve-foot leap.

The prospect got dimmer when Chie-Hoon caught them making that same leap from dry ground. Their limit was some five or six leaps until they hit water again, but that gave them quite a range.

It was as pretty a piece of native bioengineering as I’ve seen, one I could appreciate even if the rice growers couldn’t. Wiping ’em out wholesale was not an option on my list, but I knew the farmers would be thinking along those lines if we didn’t come up with something by next growing season.

I don’t mess with the Mirabilan ecology any more than I have to. We don’t know enough about it to know what we’re getting into. Even if I thought we could do it, we’d be fools to try to wipe out any native species. The Earth-authentic species we’ve imported have played havoc enough with the Mirabilan ecology.

I wasn’t paying much attention to anything but the problem at hand, so when Susan exclaimed, “Noisy! You look awful,” I practically jumped out of my skin and busted my elbow turning my chair.

“Noisy” is Susan’s pet name for Leonov Bellmaker Denness, and he did look awful. His white hair looked like something had nested in it; he was bleeding—no, had bled profusely—across the cheek; his shirt hung in tatters from the shoulder and there were raking claw-marks along his upper arms. Mike went scrambling for the emergency kit.

The only thing that spoiled the impact of all this disaster was that Leo was grinning from ear to ear. “Now, is that any way to greet an old friend?” he said to Susan. “Especially one who’s come courting?”

He turned the grin on me and it got broader and brighter. Then he made me a deep formal bow and started in: “Ann Jason Masmajean, I, Leonov Bellmaker Denness, beg you to hear my petition.”

I got to my feet and bowed back, just as deeply and formally, to let him know I’d be glad to hear him out. He made a second bow, deeper than the first, and went on: “I have brought you a gift in symbol of my intentions …”

Mike had the medical kit but he stood frozen. Chances were neither he nor Susan had ever seen a ship’s-formal proposal except in the old films. The novelty of it kept either from interrupting. Just as well. I was enjoying the performance: Leo has flair.

Besides, I wouldn’t dream of interrupting a man in the process of cataloguing my virtues, even if some of those “virtues” would have raised eyebrows in a lot of other people. I especially liked being called “reasonably stubborn.”

At last Leo got to the wrap-up. “It is my hope that you will accept my gift and consider my suit.” He finished off with yet another bow.

Seeing he was done spurred Mike and Susan into action. Susan held Leo down while Mike worked him over with alcohol swabs. “No respect for ritual,” Leo complained, “Back ’em off, Annie, can’t you? I’m not senile yet! I did clean the wounds.”

Leo had spent years as a scout, so I didn’t doubt his good sense. He’d hardly have lived to the ripe old age he had if he hadn’t been cautious about infection in the bush.

To the two of them, he protested, “The lady hasn’t answered yet.”

“Back off,” I told the kids.

They didn’t until I advanced on them. Mike took two steps away from Leo, put his hands behind his back, and said to Susan, “Now he’s going to get it.” Susan nodded.

Leo just kept grinning, so I gave him a huge hug hello to make sure nothing was broken. The rest of him looked just fine, so I stepped back and bowed once more to meet the requirements of the ritual. “Leo Bellmaker Denness, I, Ann Jason Masmajean, am sufficiently intrigued to view your gift.”

He crooked a finger and led me outside, Mike and Susan right behind. “In the back of the truck. Don’t open that door until you’ve had a good look!”

So we climbed the back bumper and all crowded to the window for a good look. We didn’t get one at first. Whatever it was was mad as all hell, and launched itself at the door hard enough to rattle the window and make the three of us jump back en masse. The door held.

Leo said, “It’s been doing that all the way from Last Edges. Hasn’t gotten through the door yet, but I’m a little worried it might hurt itself.”

“It’s not itself it wants to hurt,” Susan said.

“You’d be pissed, too, if somebody wrestled you away from your mama and shoved you into the back of a truck headed god-knows-where,” Leo said.

The door stopped rattling. I got a foot on the back bumper and hoisted myself up for a second try. Leo’s present glared at me through the window and snarled. I snarled back in the same tone.

Since it was a youngster and I was an unknown, it backed off with a hop, letting me get a good look. In overall shape, it was kangaroo, but it had the loveliest set of stripes across the hips I’d ever seen—and the jaw! Oh, the jaw! It opened that jaw to warn me to keep back, and the head split almost to the ear, to show me the sharpest set of carnivore teeth in history.

“Oh, Leo,” I murmured, stepping down from my perch. “That’s the nicest present anybody’s ever brought me.” I gave him another big hug and a thorough kiss for good measure. “Leonov Bellmaker Denness, I accept both your gift and your suit.”

He beamed. “I knew I got it right.”

“Oh, shit!” said Mike, from behind me. “Susan! It’s a goddam kangaroo rex!” He stared at Leo in disbelief. “Are you telling me this man brought you a kangaroo rex as a courting present?”

Susan, in turn, looked at Mike in disbelief. “It’s perfect, you idiot! It means Noisy knows exactly what kind of person she is, and how to please her. Don’t you understand anything?”

That would have devolved into a squabble—let a twenty-four-year-old and a sixteen-year-old discuss any subject and that’s the usual outcome—but the kangaroo rex slammed against the door of the truck again and brought them both back to their senses.

“Leo,” I said, “go on over to my house and get yourself cleaned up. We’ll wrestle the thing into a cage. Then I want to hear all about it.”

He nodded. “Sure. Two things first, though. Pick the right cage—I saw that thing jump a six-foot fence—then contact Moustafa Herder Kozlev or Janzen Herder Lizhi in Last Edges. I told Moustafa I’d make the official report on his Dragon’s Tooth but I doubt he believes me.” He examined a set of skinned knuckles. “Not when I punched him to keep him from shooting it.”

“My hero,” I said, meaning it.

He kissed my hand and vanished in the direction of my house. I turned to my available team-members and said, “Don’t just stand there with your eyes hanging out of your heads. Let’s get to work.”

By the time we’d gotten an enclosure ready for the creature, Chie-Hoon and Selima had returned from up-country, where they’d been watching those damned hopping fish in the act. Just as well, because it took all five of us to maneuver the kangaroo rex safely out of the truck and into captivity.

Most of us wound up with bruises. It was still mad as all hell. It slammed each side of the fence in turn (didn’t take it but two hops to cross the enclosure either) and once shot up and cracked its head on the overhead wire. That settled it down a bit. I sent Selima to get it some meat.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing. I hadn’t seen one for nine years.

“Another outbreak of kangaroo rexes,” said Chie-Hoon, “Just what we needed. I assume it sprang from the kangaroos around Gogol?”

“Last Edges,” I said. That didn’t surprise me, the EC around Last Edges being almost identical to that around Gogol. “Contact Herders Kozlev and Lizhi up there. Tell them we’ve been notified. Find out if they’ve seen any more—”

“The usual drill,” said Chie-Hoon.

“The usual drill.”

Selima came back. She’d brought one of the snaggers Mike invented—let him do the honors of getting the cell sample while she distracted it with the meat. Or tried to. The snagger doesn’t do more than pin-prick, but that was enough to rile the rex into slamming against the fence again, trying to get at Mike while he reeled the sample through the chain-link.

Mike jerked back but the sample came with him. He held it out to me. “Hardly necessary,” he said. “I know what we’re gonna find.”

So did I. There was no doubt in my mind that the sample would match those from the last outbreak gene for gene. The kangaroo rex had settled down, wolfing at the meat Selima had tossed it. “It eats gladrats,” said Selima, looking surprised. “It can’t be all bad.”

Not as far as I was concerned, it couldn’t be all bad. If it was a Dragon’s Tooth, it was a beautifully constructed one—completely viable.

That may need a word of explanation … . You see, when they shipped us off to colonize Mirabile, they were into redundancy. We got cold-storage banks of every conceivable species. (I use the “we” loosely; I’m thirdgeneration Mirabilan myself.) But on top of that we also got the redundancy built right into the gene helices of all the stored species. Some bright-eyed geneticist back on Earth had apparently gotten that idea just before the expedition set off: genes within genes, helices tucked away inside other helices.

It was a good idea in theory. If we lost a species (and lost the ability to build it ourselves), sooner or later it would pop up spontaneously—all it needed was the right environmental conditions. Given the right EC, every hundredth turtle would lay an alligator egg.

In practice, it was a rotten idea. We’ll never lack for alligators, not on Mirabile. They didn’t tell us how to turn off those hidden helices, or if they did, the technique was only described in that part of ship’s files we’d lost. So we Jasons have a running battle with cattle that are giving birth to reindeer and daffodils seeding iris (or worse—cockroaches).

Meanwhile, in the manner of all genes, the hidden genes mixed. While the turtle genes were reproducing turtles, the alligator genes tucked in with the turtle genes were mixing with god-knows-what. So given the right EC, we got chimera—familiarly known as Dragon’s Teeth.

It was possible that the kangaroo rex was just an intermediate, a middle step between a kangaroo and anything from a gerbil to a water buffalo. Right now, however, it was a kangaroo rex, and impressive as all hell.

“You watch it, Mama Jason,” Susan said. “I’ll do the gene-read.” She reached for the sample as if she had a vested interest in the beast herself. She figured she did, at least. Must have been all the times she’d made me tell the story of the first outbreak.

She may be the youngest and newest member of the team, but she can do a gene-read with the best of us. I handed the sample over.

Then I just stood there quietly and appreciated it. About three feet tall (not counting the tail, of course), it was already quite capable of surviving on its own. Which meant, more than likely, that its mama would very shortly move its sibling out of storage and into development. Chances were pretty good that one would be a kangaroo rex, too. Since the mama hadn’t abandoned this one, it seemed unlikely she’d abandon another. I wondered if there were enough of them for a reliable gene pool.

The rex had calmed down now that it had eaten—now that most of the excitement was over. It was quietly investigating the enclosure, moving slowly on all fours. Hunched like that, it looked a lot like a mythological line-backer about to receive. With those small front legs, you never expect the thing (even a regulation kangaroo) to have the shoulders it does.

As it neared the side of the fence that I was gaping through, it yawned— the way a cat does, just to let you know it has weapons. I stayed quiet and still. It didn’t come any closer and it didn’t threaten any further.

That was a good sign, as far as I was concerned. Either it was full or it didn’t consider me prey. I was betting it didn’t consider me prey. Still, it was nasty-looking, which wasn’t going to help its case, and it was still a baby. Adult, if it were a true kangaroo rex, it would stand as high as its kangaroo mother—six or seven feet.

In the outbreak of them we’d had nine years back near Gogol, they’d been herd animals. There had been some twenty-odd, with more on the way, of course. Chie-Hoon tells me kangaroos come in “mobs,” which seemed appropriate for the kangaroo rexes as well, if a little weak-sounding. And we’d wiped out the last group wholesale.

Oh, I’d yelled and screamed a lot. At the very least, I’d hoped we could stash the genes so we could pull them out if we ever needed the creature for some reason. I got voted down, and I got voted down, and finally I got shouted down.

This time would be different.

The kangaroo rex sat back on its tail and began to wash, using its tongue and paws as prettily as any cat. In the midst of cleaning its whiskers, it froze, glanced up briefly, then went back to preening.

That was the only warning I had that Leo was back. He hadn’t lost the ability to move softly with the passage of years. He put his arm around me and I leaned into him, feeling a little more than cat-smug myself, though I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Maybe because I hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

“Pretty thing,” Leo said softly, so as not to startle it. “Now I understand why you wanted to keep them.”

“This time we are keeping them,” I said.

There was a clatter of the door behind me. The kangaroo rex bounced to the farthest side of the enclosure, hit the fence on the second bounce, and froze, jaws agape and threatening.

“I know what you’re thinking, Annie,” Mike said. “You’d better come talk to these guys first. You’re not going to like what you hear.”

Herders Jarlskog and Yndurain were not inclined toward leniency, especially not Jarlskog, who had worked himself up into a fine sense of outrage. To hear him tell it, you’d have thought a mob of rexes had eaten his entire flock, plus several of his children. So the entire town was already in an uproar.

I halfway agreed with their sentiments. I like the occasional lamb chop just as much as the next guy—especially the way Chris cooks them up at Loch Moose Lodge—and this was one of only seven flocks on all of Mirabile. Sheep here are labor-intensive. They can’t be trusted to graze unattended: forever eating something native that’ll poison them. So we keep only the seven flocks and we keep them on a strict diet of Earth fodder.

All this means that they have to be kept behind fences and that the plant life in there with ’em has to be policed regularly. That’s one of the reasons all the flocks are on the fringes of the desert—it’s easier to irrigate the plant life into submission.

The result of all this is that we eat a lot more kangaroo tail soup than we eat lamb curry. The kangaroos fend for themselves quite nicely, thank you, and there’s no shortage of them.

Jarlskog wanted me to arrange an instant shortage of kangaroo rexes. So did Yndurain. In an hour’s time, the rest of the town would start calling in with the same demand. I soothed them by telling them I’d have a team up there by the end of the day. In the meantime, they were to shoot only if they saw a rex actually in with the sheep.

They grumbled some but agreed. When I canceled the call, I turned to Leo. “What do you think? Will they go right out and shoot every kangaroo in sight?”

“No,” he said. “Janzen and Moustafa are good kids. I think they can put a damper on the hysteria. Once I convinced Moustafa the rex was mine, he was even willing to help me catch it.”

“It took a bit of convincing, though.” I glanced significantly at his skinned knuckles.

He grinned and shrugged. “In the heat of passion.” His face turned serious and he added, “He will shoot any roo that jumps that fence today, though, so if you want to head up there, now’s the time.”

Mike handed me a sheaf of hard copy. It was the list of everybody who lived in a hundred-mile radius of the spot where the rex had turned up. “Good news,” he said. “We only have to worry about twenty families.”

That is the only advantage I know of being underpopulated. For a moment, I considered not issuing a general alert. After all, for all we knew, there was only one kangaroo rex and it was in our backyard.

Mike read my mind and shook his head. “If you want to keep them, Annie, you better not risk having one of them eat some kid.”

“It was only an idle thought,” I told him. “Put out a notification. Keep the kids in, keep the adults armed. But add that I don’t want them shot unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Chie-Hoon said, “Annie, we’re not going to go through this again, are we?”

“Damn straight, we are,” I said, “and this time I intend to win! Who’s coming with me?”

“Me,” said Leo.

“And me,” said Susan, looking up from her monitor. “It is the same kangaroo rex as last time, Mama Jason, only I’ve got two secondary helices here. They’re both marsupial, but more than that I can’t tell you offhand. It’ll take the computer all night to search.”

“Let me have a look first,” Chie-Hoon said. “Maybe I’ll recognize something. I have a vested interest in marsupials, after all.”

Everybody’s got to have a hobby. Chie-Hoon’s is the Australian Guild, meaning Chie-Hoon knows more than anybody could ever want to about the customs and wildlife of Earth’s “Australia,” which includes about ninety percent of the marsupials found in ship’s records.

“Help yourself,” I said. I’d never found the time to join any of the Earth Authentic Guilds myself—if I were looking for a hobby I rather thought I’d make it Leo—but this was the sort of thing that came in handy. “Since Leo volunteers to come along, we’ll leave you to it.”

We’re habitually short-handed, and since I’d worked with Leo once before I knew he and I could handle just about anything that came up. As for Susan, well, Earth-authentic wild horses couldn’t have kept her away.

Mike looked glum. “I get stuck with the fish, right?”

“And Selima,” I pointed out, which brightened him up considerably. (I’m rather hoping those two will decide to help alleviate our underpopulation problem one of these fine days. I’m giving them every opportunity.) “We’ll be in touch.”

“We’ll argue,” Mike assured me.

We took my skimmer. Leo, being retired (hah!), no longer rates up-to-date equipment. We let Susan drive and scandalized her by necking in the back seat. When we’d caught up a bit on old times, we broke the clinch.

“Why will you argue?” Leo asked.

“You remember, Noisy. Mama Jason wanted to keep the kangaroo rexes the last time they cropped up. Mike and Chie-Hoon didn’t.”

“A lot of people didn’t want them kept,” I said. “I lost that round.”

“It’s not going to be any easier this time,” Leo said. “Both those herders were—if you’ll pardon the expression—hopping mad.”

Susan giggled. So did I.

“I know. But I’m older and meaner this time around.”

“‘Meaner’?” That was Susan. “Mama Jason, last time one of the damn things almost chewed your foot off!”

“D’you think I could forget something like that?” I leaned on the back of the seat and glared at her in the mirror. “That has nothing to do with it.”

“‘You never know what might be useful in the long run.’ I know,” Susan said. “It’s not as if we’re going to pick up and go back to Earth if we run out of sheep, either.”

I gave a sidelong glance at Leo. “Just what I needed; somebody who quotes my own words back at me … .”

“You’ve only yourself to blame,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Susan, to let us both know she took this little routine as a compliment. “Now tell me who took what side last time around, and what you expect them to do this time.”

“It was me against them,” I admitted. When Susan whistled, [ stuck in, “I almost got Mike to go along with me, but in the end, that wouldn’t have made any difference. Mike didn’t have much pull then.”

“Meaning he was about the same age I am now,” said Susan, “so my opinion won’t swing much weight either.”

“I had intended to be tactful.”

Leo raised an eyebrow at me. “That’s not like you, Annie. Do you need the allies that badly? It occurs to me that you swing a bit more weight these days yourself.”

“Oh, considerably. But that won’t do me a lot of good unless I can convince people like Jarlskog and Yndurain that the rexes are worth keeping. For god’s sake, Leo! What’s to stop them from simply shooting down every one they see? We certainly haven’t the hands to police every last bit of territory, especially not Last Edges or Gogol or the like.”

Last Edges has a total population of fifty. That’s minute, but it’s five times the number of people I’ve got to work with.

“Most people understand enough about ecological balance to follow the guide-lines you folks set,” Leo said, but with a bit of a rising inflection.

“If I tell them it’s ‘Earth-authentic,’ sure. But this one isn’t. Furthermore, nobody in his right mind likes it.”

“I like it,” Susan said. When I didn’t respond to that, she said in a small amused voice, “Oh,” then giggled, then sighed in resignation. “So what do we do?”

“Nothing, until we check out the situation locally.”

The local situation hadn’t simmered down while it waited for our arrival. Not that I’d expected it to, but I could see that both Susan and Leo had. A third of the adults were guarding the sheep field with guns. Another third, I imagine, was guarding the kids likewise. The rest turned out to be a combination welcoming committee and lynch mob. Read: we were welcome, the kangaroo rexes were most emphatically not.

I listened to the babble without a word for all of twenty minutes, motioning for Susan and Leo to do the same. Best to let them get as much of it out of their systems as possible while we waited for a couple of leaders to sort themselves out of the crowd—then we’d know who and what we were actually dealing with.

In the end, there were two surprises. The first was that someone was dispatched to “Go get Janzen. Right now.” When Janzen arrived, Janzen got thrust to the fore. Janzen was about Susan’s age. He looked at me, cocked an eyebrow at Leo, who nodded and grinned, then he grinned at me and stuck out his hand. That was when I noticed the striking resemblance the kid had to Leo. I cocked an eyebrow at Leo, whose grin got wider.

Janzen took care of shutting down the general noise level and introducing us to the population at large. Leo got introduced by his previous job description—as Leonov Opener Denness—and yes, Leo was Janzen’s grandad. Both of which upped our status exactly the way Janzen had intended them to. At a bet, a lot of the local kids had been through a survival course or two with Leo.

The second surprise wasn’t nearly as pleasant. The other speaker for the populace—read “loudmouth” in this case—was none other than Kelly Herder Sangster, formerly a resident of Gogol. She’d wanted the kangaroo rexes near Gogol wiped out and she wanted the same thing here and now.

I knew from experience how good she was at rousing rabble. She’d done it at Gogol. I could talk myself blue in the face, put penalties on the shooting of a rex, but I’d lose every one of them to “accidental” shootings if I couldn’t get the majority of the crowd behind me.

Sangster squared off, aimed somewhere between me and Janzen, shoved back her hat, bunched her fists on her hips, and said, “They eat sheep. Next thing you know they’ll be eating our kids! And Cryptobiology sends us somebody who loves Dragon’s Teeth!”

She pointed an accusing finger at me. “When they attacked us in Gogol, she wanted to keep them! Whaddaya think about that?” The last was to the crowd.

The crowd didn’t think much of that at all. There was much muttering and rumbling.

“I think,” I said, waiting for the crowd to quiet enough to listen, “I’d like to know more about the situation before I make any decisions for or against.”

I looked at Janzen. “You were the first to see it, I’m told. Did it eat your sheep?”

“No, it didn’t,” he said. That caused another stir and a bit of a calm. “It was in the enclosure—but it was chasing them, all of them, the way a dog does when it’s playing. To be fair, I don’t know what it would have done when it caught them. We caught it before we could find out.” He looked thoughtful. “But it seems to me that it had plenty of opportunity to catch a sheep and didn’t bother. Moustafa? What do you think?”

Moustafa rubbed his sore jaw, glowered at Leo, and said, very grudgingly, “You’re right, Janzen. It was like the time Harkavy’s dog got into the sheep pen—just chased ‘em around. Plenty of time to catch ’em but didn’t. Just wanted to see them run.” He glowered once more. “But for a kangaroo, it’s an adolescent. Maybe it hasn’t learned to hunt yet. That might have been practice.”

“I concede the point,” I said, before Sangster could use it to launch another torpedo. “The next thing I need to know is, how many of them are there?”

As if prompted (perhaps he was, I hadn’t been watching Leo for the moment), Janzen said, “For all I know, only the one.” He looked hard at Sangster. “You see any?”

Sangster dropped her eyes. “No,” she muttered, “not since Gogol.” She raised her eyes and made a comeback, “No thanks to Jason Masmajean here.”

Janzen ignored that. “Anybody else?”

“That doesn’t mean a damn thing, Janzen, and you know it,” someone said from the crowd. “For all we know, the entire next generation of kangaroos will be Dragon’s Teeth—and that would be a shitload of kangaroo rexes!”

“I say we get rid of them while there’s only one,” Sangster put in. “I’m for loading my shotgun and cleaning the roos out before they sprout Dragon’s Teeth!”

“Now I remember!” I said, before the crowd could agree with her, “You’re the one that’s allergic to roo-tail soup!”

“I’m not allergic—I just don’t like it,” she snapped back, before thinking it through.

“Well,” said Janzen, “I like roo-tail soup, so I’d just as soon consider this carefully before I stick myself with nothing but vegetable for the rest of my life.”

“Rest of your life …” Sangster sneered at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’ll take that question,” I said. “If you’ve a genuine outbreak of kangaroo rexes here, instead of a one-shot, then you’ll have to destroy all the kangaroos. That’s what was done at Gogol. Gogol can never let the kangaroo herds—”

“‘Mobs’” corrected Sangster, “Kangaroos come in mobs, not herds.”

“Gogol can never let the kangaroos mob again. Any kangaroo found in that EC is shot. The environmental conditions there are such that sooner or later any kangaroo around Gogol will produce a kangaroo rex.” I gave a long look through the crowd. “I won’t lie to you: Last Edges has roughly the same EC as Gogol did. Which means you may have to face the same decision. As for me, I’d wait to find out if the rexes eat sheep before I decide to kill off all the roos.”

“Sounds fair,” said Janzen, almost too promptly. “How do we go about this?”

“First, I want a good look at your EC. I want to see, if you haven’t scuffed it up too much, where you spotted the rex. Then we do a little scouting of the surrounding area.” I grinned over my shoulder at Leo. “Luckily, we have somebody who’s an old hand at that.”

“Luckily,” agreed Janzen.

“But I could also use some additional help.” I looked straight at Sangster—I wanted her where I could keep an eye on her and where she couldn’t rabble-rouse while I was busy. “What do you say, Sangster? Willing to put in a little effort?”

What could she say? She just said it with all the bad grace she could muster.

“Take Janzen, too,” came a voice from the crowd. Aha! there were two factions already. “Yes,” agreed another voice, “You go with ’em, Janzen. You like roo soup.”

“In the meantime,” I said, “stick to the precautions we already discussed. However—if anyone spots a rex, I want you to notify us immediately. Don’t shoot it.”

“Oh, yes, right. Don’t shoot it,” Sangster mocked.

I looked at her as if she were nuts. “Look,” I said, “if there are more than one, it can lead us to the rest of the mob. Or would you rather just hunt them by guess and by golly? I don’t have the time myself. Are you volunteering?”

That was the right thing to say, too. So I added one last filip. “Susan?” Susan edged forward. “Susan will be in charge of collecting the gene samples from each sheep, simply as a precaution.”

This did not make Susan happy—she wanted to go haring off after the kangaroo rexes—but I knew she wouldn’t argue with me in public. “Sample each?” she said.

“That’s right. I don’t want a single one lost. After all, who knows what genes they’ve got hidden in those? Might be, one of them can sprout the Shmoo.”

That brought a bit of laughter—the Shmoo’s a legendary creature that tastes like everything good and drops dead for you if you look at it hungry. The ultimate Dragon’s Tooth, except that Sangster would never use that derogatory term for something she approved of.

The crowd approved our plan, especially the part about collecting gene samples from each sheep. It was a nuisance to do, but I knew it would settle them down. Herders know as well as anybody how desperately we need diversity within a species. I was offering to clone any sheep we lost to the rexes in the process of my investigation. That meant they’d lose the time it took to bring the sheep back to breeding age, but that they wouldn’t lose any genetic variation.

Moustafa volunteered to help Susan with the sampling. So did a handful of others. Then the rest of the crowd dispersed, leaving us to get down to business at last.

Moustafa led the way to the sheep pen where Janzen and Leo had bagged my baby rex. The enclosure looked like every single one I’ve ever seen, identical to those at Gogol, identical to every other one in Last Edges as well, no doubt. It sounded like the crowd had—lots of milling, scuffling, and bleating.

The moment we rounded the corner and saw the sheep, I had to clamp my jaw hard to keep from laughing. The sheep were an eye-popping skyblue, every single one of them! Susan did burst into laughter. I elbowed her hard in the ribs. “Don’t you dare laugh at Mike’s sheep,” I told her.

Mike had been trying for a breed that could eat Mirabilan plant life without killing itself. What he’d gotten was a particularly hardy type that tasted just as good as the original, but sprouted that unbelievable shade of blue wool. Mike had promptly dubbed them “Dylan Thomas sheep,” and offered them out to the herders. Janzen and Moustafa had obviously taken him up on the offer.

Susan simmered down, just barely, to giggles. “But, Mama Jason,” she said, “all this fuss because a Dragon’s Tooth might eat a Dragon’s Tooth … .”

And at that Janzen laughed too. He looked at Susan. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but, now that you mention it, it is funny.” He cocked an eyebrow at Moustafa, who sighed and said, “You always were nuts, Janzen. Yeah. It’s funny.”

Moustafa looked at me more seriously, though. “But we can’t afford to lose many. It’s not as if we’ve got a high population to play around with. We don’t even dare interbreed them with the Earth-authentics until we’ve built up the flock to twice this size or more.”

I nodded. The kid was as sensible as Janzen. I wasn’t surprised he’d taken a shot at the rex. In his position, I probably would have too. Hell, I’d have done it if they’d been the Earth-authentics. Why mess around? “Okay, Susan,” I said, “Start with this flock. Make sure you get one of each.”

If the artificial wombs were free this winter, I’d see Mike’s pet project doubled, whether we needed them or not. Pretty damn things once you got over the initial shock. They smelled godawful, of course, but what sheep doesn’t? The wool made beautiful cloth and even more beautiful rugs. It was already something of a posh item all over Mirabile.

“All yours,” I said to Susan, and she and Moustafa set to work.

I followed Leo along the fence, watching where I put my feet. When you’ve got an expert tracker, you stay out of his way and let him do his job. Janzen knew this just as well as I did, so he was the one, not me, who grabbed Sangster to keep her from overstepping Leo and messing up any signs of the rex.

It wasn’t long before Leo stopped and pointed us off across the sheep field. I shouldered my gear and we set out to track the kangaroo rex.

Tracking a kangaroo isn’t as easy as you might think, even with the help of a world-class tracker like Leo. (I’m not so bad at it myself. Neither is Janzen, as it turns out.) These kangaroos were reds (I don’t mean the warning-light red that signals that some critter is about to chain up to something else; I mean a lovely tawny animal red) and they are world-class distance jumpers, especially when they’re panicked. They had been by Moustafa’s rifle shot, which meant they’d been traveling in leaps of fifteen to twenty feet. So it was check the launch spot, then cast about for the landing and subsequent relaunch.

It was only guesswork that we were following the rex’s mother anyway. We wouldn’t know her to look at her. Only a full gene-read could tell us that. I’d have to sample most of the roos in the mob to find out how many of them were capable of producing baby rexes.

Sangster bent down to uproot a weed or two. When I frowned at her for taking the time, she held out the plant to me and said, “That’ll kill a sheep as sure as a kangaroo rex will.”

Janzen looked over. “Surer,” he said. “I still don’t know if kangaroo rexes eat sheep.” To me, he added, “But that will poison one. That’s lambkill.”

I almost laughed. Like any Mirabilan species we’ve had occasion to work with, it has a fancy Latin name, but this was the first I’d heard its common name. The fancy Latin name is an exact translation. Sounded like Granpa Jason’s work to me.

Sangster stooped to pull another. Curious how small they were. Must mean they policed the fields very carefully. These were newly sprouted. I spotted one and pulled it myself, then stuck my head up and looked for Leo again. He’d found the next set of footprints.

Good thing the roos have such big feet. In this kind of wiry, springy scrub we wouldn’t have had much chance otherwise. Leo wiped sweat from his forehead and pointed toward the oasis in the distance. “Chances are they’ll be there, including our rex’s mother. In this heat, they’ll be keeping to the shade to conserve water.” He glanced at Janzen. “Is that the only natural source of water in the area?”

Janzen nodded.

I squinted into the shimmer. The plants had that spiky look of Mirabilan vegetation. There was a distinct break between the Earth-authentic lichens and scrub, then a fence, then a broad strip of desert, then the dark green of the Mirabilan oasis. The broad strip of desert was maybe twenty hops for a roo, or looked that way from this angle.

“Even the roos are a problem,” Sangster observed. “They can hop the fence—they bring the lambkill seeds in on their fur.”

“It’d blow in from there,” I said. “Same as it did at Gogol.” I couldn’t help it. I’d been wondering ever since I first spotted her in the crowd. “Herder Sangster, what made you leave Gogol?”

Sangster scowled, not exactly at me. “It’s Crafter Sangster now. I lost my flock, seventy percent of it anyway.”

Leo said, “To the kangaroo rexes?”

She just about glared him into the ground. “To the lambkill,” she said. “After we got rid of the rexes and the roos that bred them, the lambkill was still there. Worse than ever, it seemed.”

“Yes,” Janzen put in. “When Moustafa and I were deciding where to raise Mike’s flock of Thomas sheep, I did some checking in the various areas available. Something in the EC here makes the lambkill less prevalent … or less deadly perhaps. The death count attributable to it isn’t nearly as high here as it is around Gogol.” He cocked his head, which made his resemblance to Leo all the stronger. “Say! Maybe you could find out what the difference is?”

“Maybe I could,” I said, making it clear I would certainly look into the problem. “But for now let’s find those roos. I’ll put Susan on soil and vegetation samples as soon as she’s done with sheep.”

To my surprise, he frowned. “Isn’t she a little young … ?”

“When’s your birthday?” I asked him. When he told me, I said, “Yeah, I guess from your point of view she is a little young. You’ve got two months on her.”

“Oops,” said Janzen. “Sorry.”

“No skin off my nose,” I told him.

Leo grinned and slapped Janzen on the shoulder. “Would be skin off his if Susan had heard him, though. Rightly, too.” Leo put an easy arm around Janzen’s shoulder. “Susan’s the one who developed the odders, Janz. You know, the neo-otters that keep the canals around Torville free of clogweed?”

Janzen looked rightly impressed. Good for Leo, I thought, rub it in just enough so the lesson takes.

“Besides,” Leo said, “if age had any bearing on who gets what job, Annie and I would be sitting in the shade somewhere sipping mint juleps and fanning ourselves. Now, could we get on with this before we all, young and old alike, melt?”

So we did. The strip of desert was wider than I’d thought. We’d need that spring as much as the roos did. Of course, they were quite sensibly lying in the shade (drinking mint juleps, no doubt, whatever they were—I’d have to remember to ask Leo about that later), going nowhere until the cool of evening.

We’d lost our specific roo (if we’d ever had her) on the broad rocky flat that lay between the strip of desert and the oasis. We paused in the first bit of welcoming shade.

Without a word, Leo signed the rest of us to wait while he moved farther in to scout the location of the mob without panicking it. I handed him the cell-sampler. If he saw anything that looked like a rex, I wanted an instant sample. I needed to know if more than one mother was breeding them.

For a long while, it was quiet, except for the sound of running water and the damned yakking of the chatterboxes. Every planet must have something like this—it’s simply the noisiest creature in the EC. It keeps up a constant racket unless something disturbs it. When the chatterboxes shut up, you know you’re in trouble. Most people think the chatterboxes are birds, and that’s good enough most ways—they fly, they lay eggs, what more could you ask of birds?

I, for one, prefer that my birds have feathers. Technically speaking, feathers are required. The chatterboxes are a lot closer to lizards. I guess the closest Earth-authentic would be something like a pterodactyl, except that all the pterodactyl reconstructions in ship’s files showed them brown or green. I wonder what the paleontologists back on Earth would have made of ours.

The chatterboxes, besides being noisy, are the most vivid colors imaginable—blues and reds and purples and yellows—and in some of the most tasteless combinations you can imagine. They make most Mirabilan predators violently ill, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The eggs are edible, though, and not just to Mirabilan predators.

We watched and listened to the chatterboxes, thinking all the while, I’m sure, that we ought to bring home some eggs if we lucked onto a nest.

Then Leo was back.

He leaned close and spoke in a quiet voice. The chatterboxes kept right on. “Annie, I’ve found the mob, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a rex—nothing out of the ordinary at all. Just browsing kangaroos.”

“Chances are, mine is the first one, then. Do you think we can all get a look without sending them in all directions?”

“Depends on your big feet.”

“Thanks,” I told him.

The whole bunch of us headed out as quietly as we knew how. I’d been worried about Sangster, but she’d obviously taken the kids’ training course to heart—she was as quiet as the rest of us.

We worked our way through sharpscrub, dent-de-lion, careless weed, spurts, and stick-me-quick. It was mostly uphill. The terrain here was mostly rock with a very slender capping of soil. Leo brushed past a stand of creve-coeur and collected a shirtful of its nasty burrs, saving us all from a similar fate. I didn’t envy him the task of picking them out.

At last Leo stopped us. Kneeling, he slid forward, motioning me to follow. Our faces inches apart, we peered through a small stand of lightenme.

There was the tiny trickle of stream that fed this oasis. In the shade of the surrounding trees lolled the mob of kangaroos, looking for the moment not so much like a mob as like a picnic luncheon. There were perhaps twenty in clear view, and not a striped hip among them. Still, that meant there were plenty more we couldn’t see.

It was also quite possible that the mother of our rex had been ostracized because of her peculiar offspring. That happened often enough with Dragon’s Teeth.

Beside me there was an intake of breath. The chatterboxes paused momentarily, then, to my relief, went right back to their chattering. Sangster pointed into the sharpscrub to my left.

I caught just the quickest glimpse of stripes, followed it to the end of its bound. As it knelt on its forepaws to drink from the stream, I could see it had the face and jaw of a red kangaroo, but the haunches were very faintly striped. I nodded to her. Good bet, that one. Different enough to be worth the first check.

Taking the cell-sampler back from Leo, I backed up—still on my hands and knees—and skinned around to get as close as I could. (Skinned being the operative word in that EC. My palms would never be the same.) Just at that moment, two of the adolescents started a kicking match.

Their timing was perfect. I took advantage of the distraction, rose, tiptoed forward, and potted Striped Rump with the sampler. It twitched and looked around but wasn’t in the least alarmed. All it did was lean back on its tail and scratch the area with a forepaw, for all the world like a human slob.

Very slowly, I reeled in the sample. (I’ve startled too many creatures reeling in samples not to be aware of that problem.) Once I had it, I stashed it in my pack, reloaded, and popped a second roo, this time a male—all chest and shoulders, a good seven-footer. If the rexes got that big, I would be awfully hard put to convince anybody they should be kept.

Not that it looked menacing now. It was lying belly-up in the deep shade, with its feet in the air. Just now, it looked like some kid had dropped a stuffed toy.

I knew better: Mike had gotten into an altercation with a red that size once, and it had taken three hundred and forty-one stitches to repair the damage. Roos use their claws to dig for edible roots. They panic, those claws’ll do just as efficient a job digging holes in your face.

Two sampled. I figured the best thing to do was keep sampling as long as I could. I got eleven more without incident. Then I almost walked into the fourteenth.

Its head jerked up from the vie-sans-joie it and its joey were browsing. The joey dived headfirst into mama’s pouch.

I knew it was all over, so I shot the sampler at the mother point-blank, as the joey somersaulted to stare at me wide-eyed between its own hind feet. Mama took off like a shot.

Next thing I knew, the chatterboxes were in the air, dead silent except for the sound of their wings, and every kangaroo was bounding every which way.

Janzen and Leo were on their feet in the same moment, dragging Sangster to hers as well. Less chance of being jumped on if the roos were stampeding away from you. Leo bellowed at them, just to make sure.

Trouble is, you can’t count on a roo to do anything but be the damn dumb creature it is—so three of them headed straight for Leo and company.

Janzen dived left. Still bellowing, Leo dived right. And there stood Sangster, right in the middle, unable to pick a direction. She took one step left, a second right—that little dance that people do in the street just before they bump into each other.

Striped Rump was still aimed straight for her.

I raised my shotgun and aimed for Striped Rump. “No, Annie!” Leo shouted. But I was thinking of Mike—I sighted.

Three things happened at once: Leo hooked a foot at Sangster’s ankle and jerked her out of the path of the roo, Janzen bellowed louder than ever I’d heard Leo manage, and I squeezed the trigger.

Striped Rump touched one toe to the ground and reversed direction in mid-leap. My shot passed over its shoulder as it bounded away from Sangster. By the time the shot had finished echoing off the rocks, there wasn’t a roo to be seen anywhere.

I charged over to where Leo was picking Sangster up and dusting her off. Polite full-body-check, that was. From his nod, she was just fine, so I spared a glance for Janzen, who seemed likewise.

“Dammit, woman!” Leo said. “What happened to ‘Don’t shoot unless it’s absolutely necessary’? That was your likeliest prospect.”

“The hell with you, Leo. You’ve never seen anybody mangled by a roo.” It came out tired. The adrenaline rush was gone and the heat was suddenly unbearable. “I’m not in the mood to be scolded right now. You can do it later, when I’m ready to thank you for saving old Striped Rump.”

I glared at Sangster. “If you’re fit to travel, I vote we get the hell out of this sun and let me process my samples.”

She opened her mouth, a little round O of a shape, as if to say something. Then she just nodded.

We slogged our way back across the sheep range. By the time we reached the shade of Janzen’s digs, I was unpissed enough to growl at Leo, “What’s a mint julep? Maybe I could use one.”

Leo shot a sidelong glance at Janzen, who grinned and said, “You know I keep the mixings. You also know you’re all welcome to stay at my place.” He cocked his head slightly to the side, “If you don’t tell Susan what an idiot I am.”

“We’ll let her find out on her own,” Leo said.

Which settled that—and us as well.

I was almost into the welcome shade of Janzen’s house when Sangster grabbed at my arm. I turned—the look on her face was downright ferocious. Here it comes again, I thought. Death to the kangaroo rex!

Instead, she demanded, “Why?” That ferocious look was still there.

I blinked. “Why what, dammit?”

“Why did you shoot at that damned roo?”

Some people just don’t get it, ever. I shook my head and sighed. “Humans are the most endangered species on Mirabile,” I said, “and you want to know why I fired?”

That was all I had the patience for. I turned on my heel, yanked away from her, and fairly dived into the coolness of Janzen’s house, letting the door slam behind me as my final word on the subject.

The mint julep improved my outlook no end, so I keyed into Janzen’s computer (rank hath its privileges) and entered the samples I’d picked up. While I was waiting for my readout, I checked my office files to see what the rest of the team had come up with.

First thing I got was a real pretty schematic of my kangaroo rex. It was an even neater bit of engineering than I’d thought at first—the teeth at the side of the jaws (they were two inches long!) worked across each other, like butchers’ shears. What with the 180-degree jaw span, that would give it an awesome ability to shear bone. Sheep bone was well within its capabilities.

That still didn’t mean it ate sheep, but it didn’t help the cause any.

Next I got the gene-reads on the secondary helices. Didn’t recognize either worth a damn. Neither had Chie-Hoon, because there was a note appended that said simply, “Annie: Sorry, neither of these looks familiar to me. We’re checking them against ship’s records now. Let you know what we find.”

That’d be sometime the next day. A search and match takes entirely too much time, always assuming that there is a match. Lord only knew what was in those portions of ship’s records we’d lost in transit.

The gene-read on Striped Rump was about what I’d expected, just a few twists off normal red kangaroo.

“Roo stew?” said a voice behind me.

“Sure,” I said, without looking up, “still perfectly edible, despite those.” I tapped the offending genes on the monitor.

“Janzen,” said Leo’s voice, “No point talking to her when she’s reading genes. She’s not talking about the same thing you are.”

That was enough to make me turn away from the screen. I looked at Janzen. “Sorry,” I said. “What was it you wanted to know?”

“I just asked if you’d mind having roo stew for dinner. I intend to eat a lot of roo while I still have the option.”

“Say yes, Annie.” That was Leo again. “Janzen and Moustafa make the best roo stew I’ve ever had. Even Chris couldn’t beat their recipe.”

Chris is the best chef on Mirabile. Like Susan, she’s one of Elly’s kids. She’s one of the reasons Loch Moose Lodge is my favorite vacation spot.

“That’s some recommendation! Can I get in on this?” That was Susan. “I put the sheep samples in the truck, Mama Jason; all set for in vitro in case we need them. Is that your rex breeder? Sangster won’t talk about what you guys found—what did you do to her? Threaten her with a corn crop that sprouts cockroaches?”

“One thing at a time,” I said. “Janzen, yes, thank you. I’m extremely fond of roo myself. Will there be enough for Susan too, or shall I make her eat rations?”

Susan threatened to punch me. Janzen grinned at her and said, “Plenty enough, Susan. Now I know why Leo wants to hook up with Annie. Just his type.”

To change the subject, I tapped the monitor again and said, “That’s our most likely candidate for rex breeder. I was just about to check for secondary helices. You can watch over my shoulder—unless you want to watch how Janzen and Moustafa make stew. The recipe’d make a good birthday present for Chris … ?”

Susan looked horribly torn for a brief moment. Janzen grinned at her again and said, “I’ll write out our recipe for you, Susan. You stick here and tell me what I need to know about the kangaroo rexes.” The kid had a lot in common with his granddad.

While Susan pulled up a chair, I turned back to the monitor and started reading genes again. Yup, there was a secondary helix, all right. I split the screen, called up the gene-read on my kangaroo rex, and compared the two. No doubt about it. “Thanks for saving old Striped Rump, Leo. She’s it.”

I stored that to send back to the lab and called up the next sample. “Let’s see how many other rex breeders we’ve got.”

By the time Moustafa dished out the roo stew, I’d found two more rex breeders in the sample of thirteen. And they were all remarkably consistent about it.

“Hell,” said Leo.

“Not exactly, Noisy,” Susan said. “That means most likely the kangaroo rex is an intermediate for an Earth-authentic.”

I was momentarily more interested in the stew than in anything else. It lived up to Leo’s billing. I was still trying to place the spices Janzen and Moustafa used when Leo laid a hand on my arm to get my attention. “Mmmph?” I said, through a mouthful.

“You’ve got to train your assistants to use less jargon,” he said.

I scooped up another forkful of stew and simply eyed Susan.

“Oops,” she said. “Sorry, Noisy. A true Dragon’s Tooth is usually a chimera—bits and pieces of the genetic material of two very different species. Even a plant-animal combination’s possible. But it’s not consistent.

“If we’ve got three roos that are going to at some time produce rexes, all of which are close enough genetically to interbreed, then most likely it’s not a Dragon’s Tooth. Most likely it’s the first visible step on the chain up to another Earth-authentic.” She waited anxiously to see if he’d gotten it this time. When he nodded, she dived back into her own dinner. “Great stew, Moustafa, Janzen. I’d sure hate it if we have to kill off the roos.”

“Any idea just how big the roo population is?” I asked the two local kids.

They exchanged a glance. Moustafa said, “Couple hundred, maybe. It never occurred to me to count.”

Janzen shook his head, meaning it hadn’t occurred to him either, then he said, “You can get some idea after dinner. Once the sun goes down, most of them will be out in the pasture, browsing. If it were crops we were raising instead of sheep, they’d be a much bigger nuisance than they are now.”

Susan raised a querying brow at him.

“Given any kind of a choice, the roos prefer their food tender, which means they go for young shoots. That’d play havoc with any food crop. Sheep will browse tough stuff that’s inedible to most Earth-authentics, and they’ll do it right down to the ground.”

“Yeah,” said Moustafa, “And they’re too stupid to know what’s poisonous and what isn’t.”

That reminded me. “Excuse me a minute,” I said—but I took my bowl of stew with me while I went to the computer to call up the home team.

I got Mike, which was good luck, and there were no emergencies in the offing, which was better. “I need an EC workup on Gogol. Can you get me one by tomorrow evening?” At his look, I said, “It doesn’t have to be complete—just a preliminary: quick and dirty is fine. We’ll do a complete if anything interesting shows up.” His look hadn’t improved, so I added, “Take Selima. With two of you, it’ll go faster and won’t be quite as dirty.”

That fixed the look right up. Ah, young love … ain’t it handy? “Anything new I should know about?”

“Yeah.” This time he grinned. “Your kangaroo rex didn’t recognize lamb as edible.”

Behind me, someone said, “All right!” on a note of triumph. I ignored that to eye Mike suspiciously. When he said nothing further, I voiced his implied, “But … ?”

“But it could learn that trick. Right now its idea of superb cuisine is chatterboxes, grubroots, and gladrats.”

Interesting. Those were all Mirabilan, and all pests from our point of view. “That’s certainly in its favor,” I said. “They’re all of a size too—nowhere near the size of sheep.”

“Means nothing. There’s only one rex on the premises. Who knows what size prey a mob of them will take on.”

“I know,” I said, “but that gives me more breathing space here.” I thought about it a moment, then got an inspiration. “Mike? Try it on those damn jumping fish next time it looks hungry.”

That brought a grin from Mike. “Annie,” he said, “our luck’s not that good this summer. Besides, the rexes wouldn’t do well in that EC.”

“Just try it. And shoot me that EC report as soon as you can.” I broke the connection, picked up my bowl, and—still thinking about it—headed back for the dinner table. I almost ran Leo down. I looked around me. The whole troop had been looking over my shoulder. “Sit,” I said, “my apologies. We will now give the stew the attention it deserves.”

Which we did, and when we were done, it was time for Janzen and Moustafa to see to their sheep for the evening … and for me and Leo to place ourselves strategically in the fields to see how many roos showed up to browse—and how many of them were breeding rexes.

We ran into half a dozen of the locals and enlisted three. Susan dug out two more samplers, but those went to Leo and Susan herself. (We’re short of equipment. I put that on the docket for winter, making more samplers or finding somebody who wanted the job.)

Sangster was nowhere to be seen. Despite Susan’s earlier comment, I had no doubt she was off somewhere raising the level of hysteria. I could have kicked myself for not dragging Sangster in with us that afternoon, just to keep her out of trouble.

It would have been a lovely evening for hanky-panky. Too bad Leo was on the opposite edge of the field. With the sun going down, there was a bit of nip in the air. Dew had started to condense and I was wet to the knees, but I laid out a bit of tarp to sit on and to drag around my shoulders and settled down to count roos.

They weren’t much worried about humans, as it turned out. At the moment, that was a plus. If the rexes had the same inclination, though, it would be just one more thing to worry about.

Susan I’d stationed roughly in eye-shot-at least, with the help of a good flashlight. But pretty soon I was so busy taking samples that I had no time for more than an occasional check on her. She was taking samples just as furiously as I was.

Moustafa’s estimate had been in the hundreds, by which he’d meant maybe two hundred. I’d have guessed more. I counted nearly a hundred within the ring of light my flashlight produced. The flashlight bothered them not at all. They placidly munched at this, that, and the other. About as peaceful as a herd of cows and about as bright: one of the youngsters nibbled my tarp before I tapped its nose. Then it hopped back into mama’s pouch and glared at me. Mama went on chewing, while I got samples of both.

In the cool of the evening, they were much more active. The youngsters chased and kicked each other and a lot of mock battles went down, reminding me of nothing so much as the way Susan and Mike behaved.

More than one of the youngsters had striped hips, so I crept as close as I dared while they were occupied with each other, to get samples specifically from them. Once again, a mock battle—great leaps in the air and powerful kicks from those hind legs—covered my movement.

Three older kangaroos paused to look up from their eating but they looked up at the antics of the youngsters with the same kind of wearied eye I had been known to turn on activities of that sort from our younger contingent. Satisfied that the kids weren’t getting into any trouble, they went back to what they’d been doing—which was grubbing in the ground, presumably for roots.

You wouldn’t believe those claws unless you saw them in action. Once again, I appreciated the muscular shoulders. I frankly didn’t see why a kangaroo rex should seem any more ferocious—at first glance, anyhow—than a basic kangaroo. Watching them, I got a tickle in the back of my skull. The stuff they were grubbing up looked familiar. Nova-light is romantic, but not as good for some things as for others. I debated the wisdom of turning my flashlight on them for a better look.

Being old hands, they would not be so likely to take my intrusion as lightly as the joey had. I didn’t want to start a stampede. There were just too many of them in the general neighborhood. I didn’t relish the thought of being run down by several hundred pounds of panicked roo.

The elder roos looked up, suddenly wary. I abandoned my plan and followed their point. Some sort of disturbance at the edge of the mob, very near where I’d last seen Susan. And damned if I could see her now—there were too many adult roos between my position and hers.

The nearby roos got a bit skittish. Two of the adult males bounced once in Susan’s direction, froze, and watched. A new mob had joined the browsing.

This was a smaller group. Dominant male, two females, and two matching joeys. Damned if the male didn’t have that striped rump. I didn’t dare edge closer, not with the nearby roos nervous already. I held my ground and hoped the quintet of likelies would pass near enough to Susan for her to get a safe shot at sampling them.

But they skirted Susan (now that my brain was working again, I decided I was glad they had) and headed in my direction. Closer examination told me that papa was a roo. Neither of the mamas was, though. To hell with the striped rump—these two were plain and simple kangaroo rexes—and most of the nearby roos didn’t like it any more than I did.

Their movements were different. (Well, let’s face it—they would be.) Except for the male, they weren’t grazing. They were searching the grass for whatever small prey the rest of the roos startled into motion. I could see why they liked to hang around with the browsers. The browsing roos gave them cover and, as often as not, sent gladrats and grubroots right into those waiting jaws.

I couldn’t recall when I’d ever heard anything eaten with a snap quite that impressive, either. I eased back down in the grass, hoping they’d get close enough that I could get shots at both the mothers and the joeys. I laid my rifle where I could reach it at a moment’s notice and raised my sampler.

To my surprise, the roos around me, after whiffling the air a few times, settled back to their browsing. When the rexes came close, the roos eased away, but didn’t panic. Not quite acceptable in polite society, I could see, but nothing to worry about so long as they kept to their own table.

One of the rex joeys pounced after something small in the grass. In the excitement of the chase, it headed straight for me. I popped it with the sampler on the spot and it jumped straight up in the air, came down bouncing the opposite direction, headed for mama. It made a coughing bark the like of which I never heard from a roo.

Mama made the same coughing sound, bounded over the joey, and the next thing I knew I was face to face with several hundred pounds of angry rex. The jaws snapped as I brought up my gun. Then something hit me in the shoulder with the force of a freight train. The gun went in one direction, I went in the other, rolling as best I could to keep from being kicked a second time by the papa roo.

A brilliant flash of light struck in our direction, illuminating the mama rex as she came after me. There was a yell and a shot from somewhere behind me. I may have imagined it, but I swear I felt that bullet pass inches from my right ear.

The mama rex stopped in her tracks—stunned, not shot. The rest of the mobs, roos and rexes alike, took off in all directions. The ground shook from their thundering kick-offs and landings.

I scrambled to my feet, the better to dodge if dodging was possible in that chaos. It was only then that I realized that some damn fool of a human had the kangaroo rex by the tail, hauling it back as it tried to bound away.

A second damn fool of a human grabbed for the rex’s feet, dragging them out from under it so it couldn’t kick.

Dammit! They’d forgotten the teeth!

I was moving before I even put a thought to it. Dived, landed roughly on the rex’s head and grabbed it about the throat, pulling the jaw closed toward my chest and hanging on for dear life while the thing struggled for all it was worth. It had the worst damn breath of any creature I’d ever gotten that foolishly close to.

Through the haze and the brilliance of the artificial light, I saw somebody race up and plunge a hypodermic needle into the upturned haunch. The rex coughed its outrage and struggled twice as hard. I almost suffocated. I don’t even want to think how close its snap came to my ear.

Somebody else was trying to loop a rope around those thrashing hind legs and not being very successful about it. I’d have let go, if I could have thought of a safe way of doing it.

Then all at once the struggle went out of the rex. It kicked weakly a few more times, then went limp, for all the world as if it were too hot a day to do anything but lie around in the shade.

The fellow with the rope said, “Took long enough!” and finished his tying—as neat as any cowboy on ship’s film. He whipped another length of rope off his hip, came round to me, and wrapped the length about the jaw, sealing it temporarily shut. Then he stood up, dusted off his hands, and said, “Kelly, you’re gonna have to come up with a better mousetrap. Damned if I’m gonna do that again!”

Sangster uncrimped herself from the rex’s tail and stood to face him. “Thought the Texan Guild would be a damn sight better at hog-tying.” The challenge in her voice was unmistakeable. “I guess the Australian Guild will have to handle the rest alone.”

“Hell,” said the Texan, in that peculiar drawl that identifies members of the guild, “just give us a chance to practice. These things move a sight different than a longhorn.”

“You’re on,” said Sangster. “Now let’s get this into the cage before the valium wears off.” She turned to me and said, “We’ll catch the rest of them for you.”

Four of them hefted the limp rex onto their shoulders and started back toward town.

None of it was making sense, least of all Sangster’s parting shot. Maybe that roo’s kick had caught me in the side of the head after all and I just didn’t know it. I felt like walking wounded.

Must have been stunned, because it wasn’t until Leo and Susan picked up my gun and my cell sampler and caught my elbows on either side that I even remembered to make sure they were okay themselves.

Leo looked about like I felt. Susan was fine, bounding along, half in front of us, half trying to carry me by my elbow, as if she’d caught the bounds from the roos. “Mama Jason,” she caroled as she bounced, “I’m so glad you’re okay! That was about the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me, ever! Wasn’t it, Noisy? Have you ever seen anything like that in your life? Just wait until I tell Chris and Elly and Mike … .”

None of that seemed to require any response from me, so I saved my breath for walking.

“Are we going to catch the rest of them?” she demanded at last. “What about the rex’s joey? Shouldn’t we find it? Maybe it wasn’t weaned yet.”

From the brief look I’d gotten at the joeys, chances were Susan was right. If the rex they’d shot full of valium lived, we’d still lose the rex joey.

But when we rounded the corner, we found a makeshift cage—a big one, much to my relief—built onto a transport trailer that sat right next to Sangster’s house. In it was the mama rex, still groggy but unmuzzled now, and her joey. At least, I hoped it was hers. It was pretty damned angry, but was expending most of its energy to try to get a response out of mama.

The entire town of Last Edges and then some had turned out to gawk. Sangster lounged against the cage like she owned ’em both. When she saw us coming, she nodded and took a few steps to meet us.

“Earth used to have zoos,” she said, with no preamble. Glancing at the Texan Guilder, she added, “Ramanathan checked out the references for us in ship’s log.” She folded her arms across her chest and, with an air of pronouncement, finished, “We’ve decided we don’t mind if you keep them in a zoo. We’ll catch the rest of them for you.”

That was not what I’d had in mind at all. Still, I wasn’t going to make any objection as long as it kept Sangster and her crew from shooting them on sight. “Who’s funding this zoo,” I said, “and who’s going to catch the grubroots and gladrats to feed them?”

Sangster and the Texan exchanged glances. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said.

I’ll just bet, I thought, but didn’t say it. I shrugged and turned to plod back to Janzen’s place. I needed a hot soak to get the kinks out. My shoulder was beginning to stiffen from the bruises I’d gotten. (At least, I hoped it wasn’t worse than bruises.) “Get that joey something to eat,” I said. “They were hunting when you interrupted them. Grubroots will do just fine. That’s what it was after.”

I left. Somebody would see to it—probably Janzen.

Sangster caught up with me at the door to Janzen’s place. “I talked the Australian guild into cooperating. I can talk them into funding the zoo, too. Marsupials are our jurisdiction. Maybe the rex is an Earth-authentic that got lost with the missing ship’s files.”

“Maybe,” I said, stopping to consider her. Damned strange woman. I was sure from her manner that she was still mad as all hell at me, so none of this made sense. “More likely an intermediate, ready to chain up to an Earth-authentic.”

“We want them off the sheep range,” she said. “It’s this or kill the roos again. We talked the Texan Guild into helping us. We can get them all for your zoo.”

What could I say? “Until the next batch chains up from the roos.” I shrugged one more time.

Sangster scowled deeper. “I saved this pair for you. I talked them into making a zoo. Now we’re even.”

She practically spat that last at me, then she turned on her heel and stamped away, raising dust with her fury.

Even for what? I wondered. Damn strange woman, like I said before.

I woke up stiff all over. Susan was balanced on the edge of my cot, barely able to contain herself. “What?” I said.

“They caught the other mama rex and her joey last night, Mama Jason. We get to keep them after all.”

“Zoo is not my idea of keeping them, dammit. Just sheer luck they haven’t killed any of them yet, between the valium and beating them into submission.” I tried to get coherent but I’m not ready for mornings, ever. “Read up on zoos—and I don’t mean the cursory reading Sangster and her mates did. Zoos always held the last individuals of the species: they were a death sentence.”

“Oh,” she said. “Mike called. He and Selima are up at Gogol, doing that EC check you wanted. He’ll have it this evening.”

“Good. I want you to do the same here. That I want this evening, too.”

“Betcha I’m faster than Mike.”

“Better be cleaner, too,” I said, “or faster doesn’t count.”

She grinned at me, bounded off the cot, and was out the door without another word. Guaranteed her report would be both faster and cleaner than Mike’s—unless I called Mike and issued the same challenge, that is. I dragged my self out of bed. Breakfast first, to get the mind moving, then to the computer to see what, if anything, was new from the lab.

What was new was a note from Chie-Hoon. “Skipped an emergency meeting of the Australian Guild for this, Annie, so you’d better appreciate it.” Appended were reconstructions of the two critters our rexes were planning to chain up to.

Chie-Hoon had a gift for that: take the gene chart and draw from it a picture of what the resulting animal would look like. There were no Latin names for ’em, which meant Chie-Hoon hadn’t been able to find a gene-read for either in ship’s records.

The first one was just a variant on roo. The second was, well, as weird a thing as I’d ever seen, including the Mirabilan jumping fish. It had the same jaw and jaw-span as the rexes, but it was a quadruped. The tail wasn’t as thick (well, it didn’t need the tail for balance the way the roos did) and the hip stripes continued up to the shoulders, narrowing as they went. Basic predator with camouflage stripes.

The pouch opening aimed toward the tail, instead of toward the head. Took me a moment to figure that out—kept the baby from falling out while the critter chased prey, probably also kept it from getting scratched up on creve-coeur in the same circumstances. What it boiled down to was a marsupial version of a wolf. Probably wouldn’t stack up too well against the mammalian wolf (a species I’m rather partial to), but it was a fine off-the-wall bit of work nonetheless.

Then I went on to the note from Mike. As Susan had said, he and Selima were on their way. Susan had forgotten to pass along the final message … which was that my courting present thought the jumping fish were great toys but showed not the slightest interest in eating them. As Mike said, our luck’s not that good this summer.

“How’s the shoulder this morning, Annie?” Leo looked like he’d been up and around for hours already.

“Stiff,” I said—and bless his sweet soul, he came right in to massage it—“I appreciate your courting gift all the more, now that I know what kind of fight you went through to catch it for me.”

“All in the name of love,” he said and I could feel his grin light up the room all around me even if I couldn’t see it. “What can I do for you today?”

“Join me on a long, probably useless, but definitely exhausting walk around the sheep fields. Unless you could pick out the spot the Australian Guild grabbed the rex in the daylight?” Probably too much to hope for.

“I can pick it out,” he said. “That big a scrabble left signs—and I know about where you were a few moments before.”

“What would I do without you?”

So we headed out. The route took us past the caged rexes. Some fifteen people were still standing about staring in at them—some tourist attraction, all right. Safe but scary, as Leo had said once in another context.

I wanted to see how they were faring myself, so I shoved through the crowd. One of the gawkers had a stick and was using it to poke at the baby rex through the bars of the cage. Just to rile it and make its mother charge him.

As I got there, the mother was just rebounding off the wire. I snatched the stick out of the bastard’s hand and slapped him a good one alongside the head with it. “You like that?” I demanded.

“Hell, no!” he said.

“Then what makes you think that creature does?”

“I—” He looked sheepish for a moment, then defiant. “I just wanted to see them move around some. They weren’t doing anything.”

“Roos don’t do anything in this heat, either. That’s their way of conserving water, you damn fool. Who raised you?”

Stunned, he told me.

“Well, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. They damn sure didn’t teach you the sense god gave the rexes there.”

“Hey! You can’t talk about my raisers—”

“Then you oughta stop doing stupid things that lead me to believe they raised you wrong.”

That did it. I watched him go all embarrassed.

“Sorry,” he said at last. “Everybody else was doing it.”

“Then prove to me that you’re a cut better. First, you get the rexes some water, so they can replace what they’ve lost. Then you get that damned Australian Guild to move this into the shade. Then you can stand here and make sure nobody else beats up on the rexes. Then I’ll revise my opinion of your raisers. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Yes, ma’am, and he’d do it, too. I was satisfied he’d keep them from being harassed further.

Then I got a chance to look at the rexes. The other joey was dragging a foot. Hellfire and damnation, they’d broken its leg catching it. I roared at Leo, “Get Sangster and her damned Australians down here right now!”

So we spent most of the afternoon coaxing the injured joey out of the cage so we could splint its leg. Zoos, just love ’em. Hope the guy that invented ’em wound up in a cage all his own—in the sun.

Sangster and her mates were apologetic but clearly had no intention of giving up their plan to catch any more rexes that turned up for their zoo. Oughta be a damned law to protect animals from people.

It was cooling toward evening when Leo and I finally set out to look for the spot I had in mind. Something was still niggling me about that, but the whole struggle with the rex had shoved it completely out of my head. I was hoping if I saw the spot again, the same thought might come back.

Leo found it for me in record time. Would have taken me twice as long. He stood in the middle of the spot where the first rex had been when that blinding light and stunning shot hit it all at once. “Now you see if you can reconstruct your position from that,” he said. “Just pretend I’m a kangaroo rex.”

“You haven’t got the jaw for it, Leo.” I cast about and made some good guesses. They were good enough that I found bits of the broken cell sampler there. I flopped down next to the bits and glanced around. Nothing jogged my memory, so I closed my eyes and tried to see it again.

That worked: the roos (not the rexes) had been digging up plants just there. I hauled myself to my feet and went over to look.

The plants the roos had been grubbing up were still there, shriveled in the heat and utterly unrecognizable. Fine. I could still do a gene-read on them if I did it now. “Okay,” I said, “Back to Janzen’s. You can make me a mint julep. If this is what I hope it is, we’ll toast Mirabile.”

What with one thing and another, I didn’t get my gene-read on the withered plants until after dinner. It was just what I expected it to be, so I put in a call to Mike out at Gogol. Mike and Selima couldn’t be found for me (aha!) but they’d left their EC run in my file.

“Susan!” I yelled and she came running. “You finish that EC check for me?”

She looked smug. “On file,” she said. “Did I beat Mike out?”

I cued up her file. “Mike’s was filed roughly the same time as yours but then he had extra hands—Selima was with him.”

“Oh,” said Susan. “Well, it’s only fair to say I had extra hands, too. Janzen helped me.” That made her look smugger and set off a second aha!, which I did not voice, as much as I enjoyed it.

I read through Susan’s EC on Last Edges, then went to Mike’s from Gogol a second time, then pulled hard copy on both. “Gotcha,” I said, as the reports stacked up in the printer. “Mint juleps all around, Leo!”

I handed Susan the sheaf of reports and said, “Read ’em. Then tell me how this EC differs from the EC at Gogol.” I leaned back in my chair, accepted the mint julep from Leo, and waited to see if Susan would see it too.

After a while, Susan’s head came up. She stared at me and her mouth worked, but nothing came out. She handed the sheaf of papers to Janzen, went to the computer, and called up the EC we’d done on Gogol all those years ago, the first time the kangaroo rexes had reared their ugly little heads. She nodded to herself, then pulled hard copy on that too.

She came back with it and added it to the pile Janzen was reading. Then she sat down and said, “To kill the rexes, they have to kill the roos—but if they kill the roos, the sheep die.”

“What?” said Moustafa and tried to wrest the reports from Janzen, who didn’t cooperate. “I don’t see it, Susan. I don’t know how to read these things.”

She gave him a pitying look but explained: “There are only two significant differences between the EC here and the EC at Gogol. The first is that Gogol has no roos—or very few; they’re shot on sight—and the second is that Gogol is awash in lambkill.”

Moustafa made a stifled noise deep in his throat. Janzen said, “Does this mean I don’t have to give up my roo-tail soup?”

“It means,” I said, “that the roos eat the lambkill, which prevents your sheep from eating it. You may be willing to give up your roo-tail soup, but how many people in Last Edges are willing to give up their sheep—the way Sangster did after the roos were killed in Gogol?”

I raised my glass. “To Mirabile,” I said.

It was Janzen who rang the meeting bell. And what with the Australian Guilders and the Texan Guilders—all of whom were antsy to be back on the range rounding up kangaroo rexes—we had a much larger turnout than expected. There was a lot of jostling and more than one case of bad manners. I had to wonder if the Texan Guild went so far as to call each other out for gunfights, but apparently not, as nobody did.

When they finally all simmered down, I explained the situation to them. I guess I expected them to forgive the rexes on the spot. I should know better at my age.

Sangster said, “Of course, the roos eat lambkill! They grub it out right down to the root—anybody could have told you that, for god’s sake!”

“You don’t get it,” Janzen shot back. “Kill the roos and the lambkill kills the sheep! That’s why you lost your flock at Gogol. D’you want the same thing to happen here? I sure as hell don’t!”

There was a good loud mutter of agreement from the crowd on that one. Sangster stamped her foot and yelled for attention. After a while she got it, but it was a lot more hostile than she was used to.

“Stabilize the roos, then,” she said. She glared at me. “You’ve done it before with domestic herds. Those guernseys that were dropping deer every other generation. You got those stabilized to where they chain up only once every ten years. Are you telling me you can’t do the same for our roos—or can’t you be bothered? Might mess up your beloved kangaroo rexes.”

I didn’t get a chance to answer. From the very back of the crowd came an agonized shout: “No, Annie! You can’t stabilize them! You don’t know what the rexes are chaining up to! I do! And you can’t stabilize the roos!”

I peered over heads and could just barely make out a mop of straight black hair and piercing black eyes. By this time I’d recognized Chie-Hoon’s voice, even though I’d never heard the kid quite so worked up about anything.

Before anybody’d had time to react to this, Chie-Hoon was standing on a chair, waving a banner-sized picture. I recognized it even from that distance: Chie-Hoon’s own reconstruction of the weirder of the two critters our rexes were chaining up to, the one with the jaws.

“Mates!” shouted Chie-Hoon, and had the instant attention of every Australian Guild member there. (When one of the locals made to object to this interruption from a nonresident, he was swiftly stifled by a menacing look from a guilder.) “D’ya recognize this?” Chie-Hoon spread the picture wide and turned, slowly, on the chair to let every one of them have a good look.

“It’s a Tasmanian wolf,” said somebody—to which there was general agreement—then a swift reshuffling of the Australian Guild to get closer.

“Good on you, mate,” said Chie-Hoon. “That’s exactly right! That’s what our rexes are chaining up to! It was extinct on Earth, but that doesn’t make it any the less Earth-authentic. Speaking as a member of the Australian Guild, Annie, I won’t have you stabilizing the rexes. Save the Tasmanian wolf!”

With that, Chie-Hoon raised a fist, dramatically, then shouted a second time, “Save the Tasmanian wolf!”

And before I knew what was happening, pandemonium reigned. The entire Australian Guild was chanting, “Save the Tasmanian wolf!” as if their own lives depended on it, with Kelly Crafter Sangster herself leading the chant.

Twenty minutes later, they released the uninjured rex and its mother, with promises to release the other pair as soon as the joey’s leg had healed, and I was being threatened with dire consequences if I didn’t return Leo’s courting gift to the fields within the week.

“They won’t let me keep my present,” I said to Leo, grinning through my complaint.

“I know,” he said, grinning just as much. “But they’ll let you keep your kangaroo rexes. That’s what counts.”

“It was a great courting gift, Leo.”

“I know.”

“We’ll have to see about re-establishing the kangaroos at Gogol, too, before we lose the rest of the sheep there to the lambkill.”

“Don’t you ever think about anything but work, woman?”

“Occasionally. Call Loch Moose Lodge and book us a room for the week. I need a vacation.”

He started off to do just that. I had another thought. “Leo!”

“You’re not changing your mind.” That was an order.

“No, I’m not changing my mind. But it occurs to me that Chris always wanted to be a member of my team, if she could be the official cook. Tell her I’m bringing her a brace of fish.” It was those damned jumping fish I had in mind. “If she can find a way to cook them that’ll make them the hot item of the season, she’s on the team.”

He laughed. “You’ve just made Chris’s day.”

He turned to go again, but I caught him and gave him a good long kiss, just so he wouldn’t forget to book the room while he was at it. “You made my year, Leo.”

Now all I had to do was think of an appropriate courting present for him. Which wasn’t going to be easy. What do you give a guy who gives you a kangaroo rex?

I’d think of something.