OLD FOUR-EYES, by Chad Oliver

Originally published in Synergy: New Science Fiction, Number 4 (1989).

It was not fear that she felt. Fear was natural to her. Fear was a part of the innate caution of her species.

This was terror.

Her liquid brown eyes stared without hope from her gray-streaked mask of fur. Her long flattened ears quivered against her shoulders. Her old-ivory claws dug convulsively into the dry grass that lined her nest. She could not retract them.

She had never known loneliness but she knew it now. He was not coming back to her. He could not come back.

She had never been trapped. There had always been a way out. So casually, it seemed, so uncaringly, there was nowhere to go.

The sounds of death were all around her. Death? Worse than death. Extinction. She knew the concept.

There was a hunger in her to climb the sky. If she could fly, she could escape. She often watched the birds. It seemed to her that the higher they flew the more freedom they had. If she could soar above the sun and beyond the stars, she might live forever.

But she could not fly. Not alone. The best she could do was to climb a tree. That wasn’t good enough.

The noises surrounded her, tearing at her guts. The steady unyielding clank of machinery. The whine of car tires on the hot hard road slashes. The betrayal of barking dogs. And the worst sound, the one that lanced her heart: the screeching high-pitched beep-beep-beep of the metal construction dragons running in reverse.

She understood what was happening. It was not mysterious to her.

The strongest instincts she had urged her to wait, to blend, to make no moves. That was the way.

But she could smell the Enemy in the windless oily air, and the Enemy was swarming. The Enemy controlled the technology and it was too much to fight. She could not hide. There was no space.

The Enemy. Was he not always and eternally the same? A killer, a chopper, a mindless destroyer? Once, long before the complex machines, he had eaten anything that moved. Lizards, snakes, bugs, turtles. Her own kind he had stone-boiled alive. She could call up the images from the meshing of memories. Now, she was not even meat. Boys who neither knew nor cared what she was fired pellets at her for sport. Steel blades tried to scoop her up for garbage. Metallic treads crushed her nests so completely that sometimes she could not locate them.

She was not in the way, not really. She was too small for that.

She was simply ignored. She did not count. The Enemy had no name for what she was. In his world, to be nameless was to be nothing.

She shivered. She tried to wrap herself in her curled tail. There had been a time when that had given her security. It did not work on this day, in this place.

The terror was too great.

Part of it was the loss of her mate. They had been bonded for many seasons. But there was more.

She had a child within her. One child. She had been a mother before, but never the mother of a single child. That was unnatural. It was as though the end of her species was known. Nothing could be spared, nothing wasted.

Her universe was not the same.

Ancient wisdom whispered to her to be still, to merge with the earth and the grass and the wood of the trees.

She could no longer listen.

Slowly, slowly, she extended her white-tipped brown tail. Painful as it was, impossible as it was, she had to act.

The old ways would not work.

She had to make her move, or die.

* * * *

Even his friends often referred to him as Old Four-Eyes. It was a tag that had been hung on him as far back as high school.

Paul Shudde’s thickish wire-framed glasses were fogging up from the humidity, but that was no big deal. There was nothing to look at anyway.

The hearing room was the same one the City Council used, and it fitted the standard pattern: comfortable padded swivel chairs behind the long table for the board members, hard wooden benches for the unfortunate petitioners.

Paul Shudde was waiting his turn. The Planning and Zoning Board, known not too affectionately as PAZBO, had to follow the posted agenda. But there was no way to tell how long each item would take. The hearings sometimes went on well past midnight. They were not well attended. If you didn’t have to be there, you weren’t.

At the moment, Big Buddy was holding forth. It was not the first time. “I love the environment,” Big Buddy purred. “Nobody in Lakeview Oaks has done more to protect nature than I have.”

Paul Shudde knew what was coming. He wished he could shut it out. Big Buddy was about to regale PAZBO again with the enthralling tale of how he had blown the whistle on the commercial doughnut enterprise sneaking into the rich shaded streets of Lakeview Oaks. Not a quaint and upscale little doughnut shop, mind you, but a chain called Soppin’ Sinkers. Good Lord, next thing you know the hamburger franchises would creep around the corner and there might be Belt Busters and Mustard Whoppers in Paradise.

The doughnut story bored the socks off everyone but Big Buddy, but Earl Collins—Big Buddy’s real name—was decidedly cozy with the dedicated volunteers of PAZBO. He cultivated them tirelessly. He practically lived in the hearing room, his spotless alligator boots never scuffing the carpet, his belt buckle flashing as big as a hubcap, his creased cowboy hat that had never known sweat or felt the sun being doffed respectfully now to this board member, now to that. Big Buddy’s aftershave lotion was sweet enough to draw flies, which it did. PAZBO would listen as long as Big Buddy wanted to talk, and then they would grant him his variance.

That was the way it was.

It was after ten when Paul Shudde got his shot. He expected to lose, of course. He was up against Money. In his experience, which was considerable, Paul Shudde versus Money was a case with a predetermined outcome.

Lakeview Oaks didn’t quite know what to make of Paul Shudde. A syndicated columnist for small-town newspapers wasn’t a real writer. He didn’t produce fat books about Texas that were bound in cowhide and placed proudly on coffee tables. Just the same, he had a handful of loyal readers. That meant at least some publicity, and PAZBO thrived on thundering silence.

“Mr. Chairman,” Paul said. He reached into his scruffy pants, pulled out a handkerchief that had seen better days, and wiped off his glasses. “I will be brief, although my worship of the environment is possibly equal to that of the previous petitioner.”

The PAZBO chairman frowned. He didn’t appreciate sarcasm, whether in Paul Shudde’s column or in person. This was serious business to him, and the chairman had nothing if not dignity. He wasn’t a real porker, but he was amply fleshed enough to show that he had not missed many meals in his lifetime. He had one of those ruddy complexions that could have been attributed to earnest outdoor activity, high blood pressure, or good whiskey. He had blue eyes as dead as marbles.

“Mr. Shudde,” he said, spreading his arms as though in benediction, “I fervently hope that you have something new to say to us tonight.”

“I do, Mr. Chairman.” Paul managed to get it out with a straight face: “I am pleased to report that the hotplate has been removed from the loft over the carport.”

Mrs. Langley, the only female on PAZBO, actually smiled. She was very nearly human.

The chairman tapped his pencil on the long table.

“That leaves us with the somewhat related problems of square footage and exterior trim,” he intoned. He said it precisely as he might have said, “You give us no other option, Shudde. We will have to blow up the planet.” Paul did the best he could. He identified deeply with every bewildered peasant who had ever confronted a mindless bureaucracy. “I have a plan to put up rock facing over the tarpaper section,” he said. “I can enclose the breezeway between the house and the carport. That will pick up close to another two hundred square feet.” That caused a stir. The PAZBO representatives were forced to confer in whispers. It wasn’t that Paul’s response to their edict was satisfactory, of course, but Paul was moving toward compliance. That had legal implications.

The chairman finally asked, “How long do you think these alterations will take?”

“Exactly six months,” Paul Shudde said. He had no intention whatever of doing the work, but he was buying time. If he asked for a continuance of no more than six months and appeared to be working on a solution, the board had to grant his request.

The chairman’s ruddy complexion flushed to beet red. He was between a rock and a hard place.

It was no secret in Lakeview Oaks that this whole idiotic mess was a result of political agitation against the grandfather clause. That was the one that allowed older residents of the area considerable latitude in conforming to new building codes. It was the principle that permitted Paul Shudde’s antiquated overgrown cabin to exist in the posh bedroom community of Lakeview Oaks.

The stink about the hotplate was that it raised the awful specter of someone actually taking in boarders in Lakeview Oaks. The nonsense about exterior trim and square footage was to ensure that only the right people—that is, wealthy ones—lived in the area.

Paul Shudde had tarpaper on his house.

If, miraculously, he snookered PAZBO this time, there were other ways to get rid of Paul Shudde.

Nothing dramatic like concrete overshoes and a body in the lake. Just a slight zoning change here, a bit of a property reappraisal there.

Tax him out.

That was the civilized way.

Paul Shudde did not belong in Lakeview Oaks. It was no place for mavericks.

“Six months,” the chairman said and banged his gavel.

Paul Shudde pushed his way out into the warm Texas night. He felt neither triumph nor sadness at his latest skirmish with PAZBO.

He felt lost.

He was losing his home, and he had nowhere to go.

* * * *

She had not chosen the old house by the lake at random.

There were several things that attracted her to it. First, there was no dog. Paul Shudde (she knew his name) had a cat that was so relaxed it spent most of its time dozing on the ground with all four paws folded into the air. It responded to all challenges with near total indifference. Squirrels ate out of its food dish with impunity. Second, there was the house itself. It was different from all the others. It had a worn, comfortable smell to it.

Third, the house did not have a true yard. There was fairly thick brush around it and a tangle of sharp-needled cedars. There was cover, if it came to that. Finally, there was the lake. Even with all the power boats that raced madly from nowhere to nowhere, she liked the water. She could not swim as well as the raccoon, for whom she was often mistaken, and she did not eat as many fish. But she knew her way around in the lake.

She could swim across to the other side, of course. The lake was only a wide river controlled by the great concrete dams the Enemy had built. The problem was that both sides of the lake were the same. One side was as crowded and stinking and blotched with manthing structures as the other.

Her heart pounded wildly as she belly-crawled down the side of the driveway to the edge of the carport. Her damp cold nose filled with the sharp scent of the Enemy. The warning signs of the manthings almost smothered her. It was hard for her to breathe.

Every ancient urge within her screamed to her that she was wrong. She was built for concealment, designed to look like many other creatures. She could freeze more completely than any possum.

She was not weak. She could fight when the odds were reasonable. She had done so more than once. But that was not her way.

To call attention to herself deliberately, to crouch in a carport where headlights would be certain to pick her out—well, that was crazy. That was suicide.

Wasn’t it?

Her brown lustrous eyes opened wide. Even by star-glow, she could see her own muzzle and tactile hairs.

She hated the brain and the sensing that had forced her to this place. It would be far easier to do what her kind had always done. It would be easier to pretend that the old ways were still working. Yes, it would be easier to die and be done with it…

It was living that was hard.

She knew that the true suicide was to refuse to change when the time had come. She was not like a deer, who could adapt reasonably well to crowding. A deer could coexist with the Enemy right up to the time when he got his antlers blown off in hunting season. She could not do that. She was not put together that way. She needed room to live her life. She needed her own space to create what she was.

It was all gone.

She had been so shattered by the horror and noise and confusion around her that she was pregnant with a single child. One.

She could not hide from herself.

She needed help. There weren’t many places she could look. She did not know what would happen.

She tensed. Her soft glowing eyes opened still wider.

See?

The headlights were turning into the driveway.

In moments, she would have her answer.

* * * *

The Ford pickup with the camper shell on the back was quite ordinary except for the discreet lettering on the door on the driver’s side. It read:

PAUL SHUDDE

FAMOUS INDOOR WRITER

Nobody ever got the joke, of course. That was the point.

Paul knew a man in Kerrville who had managed to sell a grand total of two stories about hunting polar bears. He had promptly put his name and the legend FAMOUS OUTDOOR WRITER on both his Jeep and his stationery. Paul had figured that the man was insane, but then the freebies had started coming. Whenever the mighty hunter wrote to a manufacturer and used his letterhead, he was deluged with rods, guns, and tents.

So Paul had tried his own version, with a notable lack of results.

His mind still on the PAZBO meeting that would eventually take his home away from him, Paul rolled into his driveway and stopped just short of the carport.

He spotted the animal right away. It was caught in the pickup headlight beams. It did not pull back. It did not cower. It simply crouched there like a child’s play-bear made out of gray-brown fur. Its eyes were unblinking. They looked as big as saucers.

Paul noticed that his prudent cat had vanished.

Paul set the transmission on park and switched off the engine. He kept the headlights on but he did hit the dimmer switch.

He climbed out of the cab, carefully.

At first, Paul was not much interested in what the animal looked like. It was its behavior that concerned him.

The animal should have tried to run away. At least, it should have retreated into some of the carport junk. It might even have attacked if it was startled and trapped.

The creature did nothing at all.

It did not act like a normal animal.

Rabies?

Paul took a closer look at it, positioning himself so that he did not cover the creature with his shadow. It did not look sick. Eyes were bright, tongue was not coated or dripping, fur was clean and healthy.

What the animal looked like was—well, weird.

Paul gave one of those insincere smiles that people try out on small children and unfamiliar animals. “What in the world are you?” he asked.

The thought occurred to him that the question might not be rhetorical at all.

Paul Shudde was not a trained zoologist but he was a native of Texas. He had a writer’s curious eye and he had spent enough time outside the cities to know a chuck-will’s-widow from a common whippoorwill. He had also read a few books in his time.

This beast was a new one on him.

It was about the size of a coon—a female, not a male—and it had a grayish bandit’s mask that was very coonlike. (He had no idea whether this particular specimen was a male or a female, and he was in no hurry to pick it up to find out.) The ears would have horrified a raccoon; they were long, soft, floppy things that belonged on a rabbit of some sort. The tail was not ringed; it was a white-tipped squirrel tail and it arched over the animal’s back as he had seen squirrels do with their tails so many times. While it crouched, Paul could not tell much about its legs or feet. The most striking thing about the wide brown eyes was that they were clearly intelligent.

This was no dummy he was looking at.

He realized that if he had not framed the animal in his headlights and looked closely at it he would have mistaken it for something else. It resembled many other things. Nobody would ever look at it twice, unless—

Unless the animal wanted to be examined.

Was that possible?

Paul Shudde took a deep breath, moved slowly back to the pickup, and cut the lights.

“Come on in if that’s what you want,” he said softly. He was quite sure the beast could understand every word. “Or you’re welcome to bunk in the carport.”

Taking his own sweet time about it, Paul walked along the breezeway, opened the door to his house, and switched on an inside lamp. Yellow light splashed out into the darkness.

Paul could hear the gentle splashing of a small ripple against the lakeshore.

He crossed his fingers.

If that thing was what it appeared to be, his troubles were over.

He sank into his favorite chair and held his breath.

Slowly, hesitantly, reluctantly, the animal moved inside. It was very frightened.

Paul Shudde exhaled and smiled a big genuine smile.

Unless he was very much mistaken, salvation had just followed him through the door.

* * * *

Run!

She had no experience with the interior of a man-thing’s house. She was confused. The conflict between what she wanted to do and what she had to do was tearing her apart.

Run! Get out! Fade into nothingness! That was what millions of years of her heritage shouted to her. She was no longer an insect-eater who stayed in the trees. The great stinking lizards were gone, all of them. But the feelings were the same.

To expose herself in artificial light was a horror to her. It was more than that. She was using the other side of her innate talent. She was actually forcing the Enemy to focus on her.

He had to understand what she was. Had to!

She did not know whether she had made a fatal mistake or not. The four-eyed Paul Shudde was not like the others, she was sure of that. But what was he like?

He was smart. In some ways, he was even smarter than she was. Allowing for what he was, he was not really vicious or bloodthirsty. He probably would come down on her side, more or less.

But was he a shade too cunning? Had he searched for angles so long that he couldn’t see something straight and simple?

She was not at all certain that she trusted Paul Shudde. Not with her life. Not with the life of her unborn child.

But there was no one else.

Nothing.

She crouched on the floor in the house of the Enemy. She let the light hit her smack in the eyes.

She desperately hoped that if she didn’t look interesting she at least looked cute.

* * * *

Endangered species. The two words burned themselves into Paul Shudde’s brain.

It took him a few days to see all the ramifications, but Paul Shudde was not slow on the uptake. He was not a man who required a crowbar blow to the head before he grasped things. Old Four-Eyes was a pretty fair country poker player, and the pale blue eyes behind the thick glasses were sharp.

A minnow could stop a giant dam from being built, if it was the right minnow.

How about a species that was not only endangered but previously unknown? How about a brand-new kind of threatened animal that had chosen to live in Paul Shudde’s house?

He laughed out loud. He thought about PAZBO and he smelled something profoundly unusual: victory.

He waved at his visitor, who was hunkered down in the kitchen. The animal was watching him with those strange brown eyes. He had figured out her sex by now—she was a mammal, after all—and it seemed to him that she was a bit fatter than she had been. She had eaten everything that he had given her except for spinach, broccoli, and beets. She did not care for vegetables.

She was death on bugs. Paul Shudde’s house was extraordinarily free of flies, mosquitoes, ants, spiders, and ticks. He was properly grateful.

He had not named her. That seemed wrong to him. She was not a pet. He did not own her.

“Friend,” he said, “you are about to become famous.”

She stared at him. He knew that she understood most of what he said to her. He did not know how she did that, but she did. He could also usually sense her reactions to what he said. She did not communicate through language, but she was not ignorant of how it worked. And she could influence his perceptions a little. He could get happiness or sorrow, pleasure or pain, agreement or dissent.

At the moment, he was getting annoyance.

The cat, who had modified its habits to the extent that it slept on its belly with its eyes slitted open, eased to its feet and flowed away on silent paws.

“Something wrong?” Paul asked her. “You understand that you’re free to leave just as you came? You understand that I’d never put you in a zoo or anything? You’re not worried about a lab, are you? Some kind of experiment? Hey, I’m on your side!”

He thought, but was somehow ashamed to say: This is me, Old Four-Eyes. I’m not a monster. If you thought I was, what are you doing here?

She did not get any of that. She could not read his mind.

She just looked at him with hurt eyes. She looked through him. The claws on her somewhat humanoid hands dug into the linoleum.

Paul had noticed those claws before. Put nails on those fingers instead, and you were maybe looking at a primate. Did that matter?

Whatever she was, she would get the job done.

“Are we friends or aren’t we?” Paul asked.

She stared at him doubtfully.

Paul Shudde moved to his desk, which was in one cleared corner of the cabin’s cluttered main room. He sat down at the worn straight-backed chair where he had always done his best thinking. He took the cover off his typewriter. He did not intend to write anything yet, but it was a part of the ritual. He stuck his pipe in his mouth but did not light it. She hated tobacco smoke.

He reflected that it was not unusual for him to have trouble with females in this house. Ladies had moved in with him from time to time, but it had never lasted. As several of them had informed him with some asperity, Paul Shudde was a man destined to live alone.

“No secrets, okay?” Paul said. “I’ll tell you exactly how all of this looks to me.”

She waited.

Paul held nothing back.

For one thing, he told her, it was very funny. He started to say as funny as hell, but he decided that using such phrases might lead them into murky water indeed.

Imagine! While the eager Americans spent lifetimes searching for the mythical Bigfoot in Asia, and good old Nessie in the Loch Ness of Scotland, and dinosaurs in the swamps of central Africa, they couldn’t even recognize what was in their own backyard.

A completely unknown species.

Oh, her kind must have been seen countless times. She could not be completely alone; there had to be enough of them to form a breeding population. But seeing is one thing. Identifying is another.

Almost always, when she did not succeed in blending into invisibility, she would have been taken for something else. Something common, something familiar. Nothing out of the ordinary. A raccoon, a rabbit, a squirrel, a fox, a dog, a rat…

And if someone did grasp that she was different, who would pay any attention? There never was a hunter without yarns to spin, and most of them were about unusual animals. The stories were received as tall tales; hunters were notorious liars, just like fishermen.

There never was a child whose imagination did not kick into high gear once in a while. Who took children seriously? That was part of what it meant to be a child: you did not have to stick to the literal truth.

Sure, there were birdwatchers and butterfly collectors and wildflower counters, but even near a large university how many people kept tabs on rabbits and squirrels—when they weren’t rabbits or squirrels?

Her bones must have turned up now and again. Her kind was not young, Paul was certain of that. But small mammal bones were a dime a dozen. If there were no artifacts with them, or something distinctly unusual, even paleontologists would not look at them twice. They would be filed under that old standby, Miscellaneous. Paul would have wagered a tidy sum that her skeleton was as nondescript as the rest of her appeared to be. It was obvious to him that her brain was remarkable for its structure, not its size. Paul had once been involved in an ill-fated affair with a book club. He remembered it well: one handsome volume free, then two a month at one hundred dollars each for a thousand years…

He had received a two-volume set on mammals of the world. He had thumbed through it casually. Now, he studied it at some length.

It was his opinion that even the experts would have disagreed about what she was. A mammal, yes. But then what? Where did she belong?

Insectivora? She ate bugs like candy.

Carnivora? She was not averse to meat, either.

Lagomorpha? Who could miss those rabbit ears?

Rodentia? She had a lot in common with a squirrel.

She was much more special than she looked, and that was a part of the puzzle. Her uniqueness was not apparent at a glance. Even after days in her company, Paul could not spell it all out.

She couldn’t transmit polychrome pictures into a man’s mind with a twitch of her whiskers. She could not use her long ears to communicate in sign language. She wasn’t an alien from the stars, complete with a magic satchel containing cancer cures and recipes for world peace.

She was home folks.

“We need each other,” Paul finished. “I can give you a home where you won’t have to worry. You can give me my home. I know something about publicity. Friend, there’s even a book in this! When they find out what you are, and where you are, they won’t be able to touch this house with an order from the Supreme Court!”

She did not look impressed.

“Come on!” Paul said. He was getting a little impatient. “I tell you, it’s even better that you look kind of ordinary. No offense. If we do this right, people will fall in love with you. They’ll send you money. You’ll become a symbol of all the lost things, all the helpless creatures shoved aside by progress. You and I, we’ll be Big!”

She closed her luminous brown eyes. It was as though she could not stand to look at him any longer.

Paul Shudde took off his glasses and wiped them on the same handkerchief he had used in the PAZBO hearing room. He was disgusted. Maybe he was giving her credit for being more than she was.

Maybe he wanted so badly for all of it to be true that he was just kidding himself.

There had been more than a little disappointment in Paul Shudde’s life.

“Maybe,” he said out loud, “you’re just another damned animal.”

The words hung in the still air.

Another.

Damned.

Animal.

Why did the words seem to mock him?

* * * *

Was he blind?

She padded across the breezeway, her claws clicking a little against the concrete. He made no attempt to hold her in his house.

There were times when Old Four-Eyes seemed stupid. Not cruel. Not evil. Not tainted like so many of them.

Just stupid.

Her kind had to know the Enemy. It was essential to their survival. As they all did, she had put in a great deal of time and effort in observing and studying human beings. You cannot hide effectively if you do not know who the hunter is.

She knew manthings rather well, both in general and in particular. She knew Paul Shudde, up to a point.

That was what made communication between them possible, such as it was.

With her own kind, blending between them was close enough so that they could predict what each one was thinking, or would think in a particular situation. It was not so much direct contact between several minds as it was different minds working in exactly the same way. There was no need for words, and she was incapable of vocal speech. She was not put together that way. The blending was not perfect, but she was aware that no communication system was ever perfect.

When she interacted with a human being like Old Four-Eyes, she had to use another technique. She could utilize her blending talents slightly to nudge impressions here and there, but basically she had to show Paul Shudde what she wanted him to see. Their minds were not similar enough for deeper meshing. But most of the words he used were no mystery to her, whether she could speak them or not. Knowing languages was a part of knowing the Enemy. Her kind had done a lot of listening. Words had been around for a long, long time. The languages of the manthings were not as different from one another as they fondly believed; there was an underlying structure that was built into the species.

In any case, she did not have to understand all human languages. Just most of the words of Paul Shudde.

Knowing what she did, it was difficult for her to see why Old Four-Eyes was being so obtuse.

Did he not understand that publicity would kill her as surely as a bullet? It would take a tougher manthing than Paul Shudde to keep out the reporters, the photographers, the scientists. She knew what tourists were, too. If she survived, which she wouldn’t, she would be a freak. Her child might as well be stillborn.

There was more. She was not quite the last of her kind. There were others, and some of them were fairly near. The only protection they had, fragile as it was, was that the Enemy did not know they existed.

It would be the end. They would be hunted down, one by one, until there was nothing left. Hunted down not just by the casual killers, the rare-trophy shooters, but by all the nature lovers, all the idle curiosity seekers, all the questers after knowledge…

She herself would have no chance at all.

Ah, would they try to mate her in a cage if they brought one of the others in alive? Would they wire her up and take notes? Would they do research?

Would they slice her up, oh so painlessly, in a sterile white anatomy lab? Or would they perhaps catch enough to establish a hopeless colony with electric fencing? They could introduce all kinds of wonderful diseases. They would have only the purest of motives—for themselves.

She could end her life as part of an experiment.

Her velvet ears quivered uncontrollably. She curled up in a fluffy shaking ball against the warm earth outside the garage. She tried to wrap herself in her white-pointed tail, to disappear.

She knew that she was nearly invisible. A human being could almost have stepped on her without seeing her. That talent was still strong. They had it even in death. Their lifeless bodies were usually ignored along with the rest of the trash.

It wasn’t good enough. Not any longer.

If they came after her kind, knowing that they were there, they would find them. They would know exactly what they looked like. They would know something about their habits.

The best way to hide, and the only way to do it over a very long period of time, was to have no one looking for you. Even infants knew that.

She smelled Paul Shudde’s pickup truck in the garage. It did not bother her as much as before. She was getting to where she could endure the scent of dirty grease and oil.

But the truck was a machine, and it was mind-linked to Old Four-Eyes. The truck sharpened her awareness of memories she would have preferred to suppress. Her kind was not lacking in humor, but they seldom thought in terms of jokes. One running amusement that they had, a theme that recurred in their legends, was the idea of the Enemy so preoccupied with his machines that he was devoid of common sense. The standard story was the one about a manthing confronted by an elementary task such as catching a fish. Instead of doing it directly, he would invent a massively complex technology to do the job. He would develop fiberglass and graphite industries to make his rods, reels that were marvels of engineering, lines that were strong enough to snare elephants, lures that were baffling in their ingenuity. Or he would invent fleets of boats, nets that could stop whales, canning factories to preserve the fish, highway networks to distribute the fish…

Her kind had not been successful with technology. They had experimented with it once, long ago, and they had failed. Ever since that time, they had been contemptuous of machines. They had their own ways. Size up the pattern, see the interconnections, make the right move at the right time. Simplify, simplify—

She had believed that it took one kind of mind to live with technology, and another kind to live without it. Her kind had spurned it.

She hated it. It was alien to her. But it was terribly strong. It was defeating her and everything like her. She was coming to a clear understanding of that.

It was not the pickup truck itself that frightened her, not its smell or its feel or its unyielding shape. It was the mind-link between the machine and Paul Shudde. They were connected.

Had she made a disastrous mistake with him? Was he too much like the rest of them? She did not think that he had been. He had been different. She would never have gone to him otherwise.

But now—

She trembled and tried to calm herself. This ceaseless panic was not good for the life within her.

And Old Four-Eyes?

She had developed a certain affection for him, despite his blindness. He probably meant well.

The question was not what would become of Paul Shudde.

No.

Rather, the question was what Paul Shudde might become.

* * * *

Paul Shudde actually had the paper in the typewriter to write the story. He did not plan on a blockbuster. His idea was to plant just enough teasers in his column to attract the attention of a few sharp-eyed readers. There were quicker ways to do the job, but he had nearly six months. That was time to allow the story to build.

He came that close.

When the chips were down, he could not do it. Sanity splashed over Old Four-Eyes like a bucket of icewater. It was the curse of his life.

“Crap,” he said. He never would amount to anything, and he knew it.

He yanked the carbon-sandwiched sheets out of the antediluvian machine. He was horrified, as though the paper itself had become contaminated. He put in fresh paper.

He had, he figured, come perilously close to thinking exactly like the good citizens of PAZBO. That was the way their minds worked. Get what you want at any price, convince yourself that nobody will be hurt by your actions, sleep the dreamless sleep of the innocent…

“Partner,” he said to his guest, deliberately lapsing into the toothless-old-sidekick talk that television believed to be characteristic of all Texans, “we came powerful close that time to burning down the barn.”

She looked up at him from her favorite curl-up place next to the refrigerator. She seemed puzzled but some of the bleak anxiety drained out of her soft brown eyes.

Paul Shudde typed a blue streak. He could work fast when he had to, and he did have a living to make.

He understood that whatever she was, she could not actually read his mind. He didn’t know whether she could read typed words or not, and he preferred not to think about it. In any case, it seemed wiser to tell her out loud what he was writing.

“You remember how the folks at PAZBO got their bowels in an uproar about my hotplate in the room over the carport,” he said. She got some of that. She liked it better when he spoke simply and directly. “That was because the hotplate turned the room into the equivalent of an apartment with kitchen facilities, you understand?”

She looked doubtful.

“Well,” Paul went on, “this column I’m writing takes off from there. It doesn’t mention you at all. It’s all about how I took that old hotplate and used it to heat up some tar. Boiled that tar right in the loft over the carport! Used it to repair my tarpaper house on the elegant shores of Lakeview Oaks.” He laughed. It was a real knee-slapper of a laugh, not a civilized snicker. “That ought to make me really popular around here, PAZBO may have to go into emergency session!”

She could not smile. She did not have the anatomy for it. She was not sure why the story struck Old Four-Eyes as so funny, but it obviously tickled him. She curled her lip a little to show her appreciation. That was as close as she could come to a visible laugh.

As he wrote, Paul’s mind was racing. When he was finished, he tried out his thoughts on her.

“There is a way,” he said finally. “I think there is a way. You’re going to have to trust me again. Do you think you can do that?”

She gave him her doubtful look.

“I did the right thing before it was too late, didn’t I? Do I have to be elevated to sainthood?”

She let that one alone.

“What do you have to lose, my friend? Nothing, right?”

She got up and paced around, her claws clicking on the linoleum. She looked profoundly uncertain.

Paul Shudde told her what they had to do.

Getting into the pickup truck was as hard for her as anything she had ever had to do. It was a completely alien act. Even after a solid month of practice runs, she could not tolerate being back in the camper shell. The fake nest made out of boxes and blankets was comfortable enough most of the time, but the closed-in feeling and the stench of the exhaust got to her. Twice, she threw up. She was ashamed of herself, but she could not control it.

Her panic returned whenever she tried to ride in the camper. The little side and rear windows were too high for her to see out of, and that was part of it. The jouncing isolation was the worst. She could not signal to him in the cab. Even when she could reach him, there were things she could not communicate.

He did not know that she was pregnant. He did not know that her time was near. He did not know that she was convinced that her child would not survive a birth in the back of the truck.

She had to ride up front, flop ears and all.

That was not easy either. It was not that anyone bothered them. It was the sheer horror of being trapped in a moving metal machine on a highway choked with cars and trucks.

Death surrounded her. The sounds and stinks she had avoided all her life twisted at her guts. She was right in the middle of them.

Old Four-Eyes kept up a running commentary. He was attempting to calm her down.

“Cedar Park,” he said. “Practically part of Austin now, like Lakeview Oaks.”

She had her eyes narrowed to slits. She was hurting and the pain was getting worse.

“Leander,” Old Four-Eyes said. He knew that something was very wrong. He was not sure what it was.

“Seward Junction,” he said. She was breathing a little easier despite her spasms. The traffic’s greasy whine was diminishing. She could almost smell green plants and living air.

Hold on, she told herself. Hold on!

She had never been this far from her birthplace.

When the truck rattled across the first of two bridges that spanned the San Gabriel River, she opened her red-flecked brown eyes enough to look. The cab window was low enough so that she could see. She could have reached out her handpaw and touched the lettering: FAMOUS INDOOR WRITER.

They were out of the cities, through the towns.

She saw long grass and shade trees and rolling hills.

She sniffed the gentle tang of wildflowers.

Hold on!

She did not know whether she could make it or not. Somehow, the pain was worse with only a single child.

They came to a locked gate. It took Paul Shudde forever to open it. She considered jumping out of the cab, but they were still too close to the narrow paved road. It was too far to cover.

She nearly cried out in agony. She bit her tongue with her sharp, strong teeth. She tasted blood.

Dirt road now. Just a track. Rough, bouncing across a field of flowers. She could smell flowing river water. She could see stands of cedar, clumps of oaks, fans of feathery mesauite.

She caught the green smell of pecan trees. Close!

They came to a gray-white cutstone wall as high as the truck. It went on for miles. It was old, constructed without mortar. It had been built to keep something out or keep something in. She didn’t know which. She hurt too badly to care.

There was a cut in the stone wall. It was just big enough to let the truck through. It was marked by slab-stone towers on each side. The towers were a couple of feet higher than the rest of the wall.

The truck started a downgrade toward the river. She could smell the fishy scent of slow-moving stream water beneath a fierce, clean sun. She could hear a faint stirring in the trees that lined the river.

Hold on!

She could not hold on. The pain was too much.

She reached for the door handle. She was able to get her clawed fingers around the handle. She did not have the strength to operate the mechanism.

She uttered a hissing scream. It was loud and it was insistent.

Old Four-Eyes looked startled. He hit the brakes, reached across the seat, and shoved the pickup door open.

She fell out of the truck, hit the ground running, and was gone.

* * * *

Paul Shudde knew that he might never see her again. Pulling a disappearing act was her major talent. She had plenty of room now.

Suddenly, it was unreasonably important to him for her to stick around. If she vanished, there would be a hole in his life.

He eased the pickup to the clearing on the bank of the San Gabriel. He drank a fair amount of Scotch as he checked out his land and got a small fire going. He did not get drunk. On the other hand, he was not cold sober either.

He was not overly impressed with what he had done. He probably could not have saved his house anyway. Exploiting her would have delayed things, that was all.

It was no gigantic sacrifice.

He had gotten these eighty acres on the San Gabriel in one of those can’t-miss Texas land deals that had been prevalent a few years ago. Surprisingly, this particular deal had actually worked out. He owned the property and it had not cost him an arm and a leg.

He called it his ranch. Anything in Texas that was bigger than an acre was called a ranch. It was in fact undeveloped land a good many miles from anywhere.

There would be no construction on his ranch in his lifetime. It was not a guarantee of forever, but it was a start.

The ranch had water and fish and brush and trees and nuts and berries. It had birds nesting in the cottonwood trees. It had free animals that left criss-crossing tracks in the earth—

Everything she needed.

As for himself, he found a measure of peace here. He needed living water and growing trees and untouched animals too. They kept him at least partially sane.

Economically, he could survive. It wouldn’t be big-time, but he could make it. His lakefront lot in Lakeview Oaks was worth something even in a depressed economy. He could sell it and move into one of the empty condos that were all over Austin. They were so desperate to fill those condos that they would accept almost any offer, even one from Paul Shudde. A change of pace would be helpful for his column. It would all work out.

He could drive out here to the San Gabriel now and then. It only took a couple of hours. The ranch was his retreat from a world where he was not entirely comfortable. He wanted it left wild.

He wasn’t doing it all for her. He told himself that he wasn’t a complete idiot.

Just the same, she had exploded from his truck as though she could not stand his presence a moment longer. He hadn’t wanted or expected cringing gratitude. What the hell. But she might have made some slight gesture of farewell.

Something.

’Way down inside, it hurt him.

He slept in the camper shell on the back of his pickup. He had a mattress in there and he had cleaned out the mess she had involuntarily made in her fake nest. He left the tailgate door up. It was warm enough so that the light breeze was welcome. He enjoyed listening to the liquid glide of the river. There wasn’t much water in the San Gabriel this time of the year, but that would change with the rains that marked the end of summer.

Without his glasses, he could not see the stars.

He was tired and the whiskey worked on him some. Still, he slept restlessly. He was pleased when he woke up in the morning without a hangover.

He could not face the day without coffee, but once that task was done there was no real reason to stick around. There was no point in looking for her.

He started up the truck and headed out. There was morning moisture on the grass. The tires left distinct tracks. The trail would remain until the sun burned it away.

He kept his gaze fixed straight in front of him. He did not want to seem to be searching.

He was going through the cut in the stone wall when he saw her. She was on top of the slabstone tower on his left. The driver’s side.

He stopped, hard.

She was a little higher than he was. He had to look up at her. His glasses were playing tricks on him.

She wasn’t alone.

“My God,” Paul Shudde said. His tone was somewhere between blasphemy and reverence. “Look at that!”

Old Four-Eyes looked up. Four old eyes looked down. She had given birth. There was a child on the tower with her. It had a small bandit’s mask and still-wet velvet ears that drooped on its shoulders and ancient wondering brown eyes…

How had it gotten up there? It was less than a day old. She must have carried it—

She was trying to explain things to him. Doing it the only way she could.

Paul Shudde did not spoil it. Sometimes, he did things right. He did not get out of the truck. He did not try to pet her. He did not frighten the child.

“Hey,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

She did not move. Her gaze was steady. Her white-tipped tail may have twitched, but just barely. She wasn’t going to make a spectacle of herself.

Paul Shudde eased the truck past the stone wall. He took it slow and steady on the dirt road that wound toward the locked gate. The last thing he wanted was to alarm them.

“Old Four-Eyes,” he said aloud. He knew that she was out of hearing range, but he was getting into the habit of articulating his thoughts for her. “Another Old Four-Eyes!”

He laughed. It made no sense, but there it was.

It was the first time in years that there had been this much happiness in him that did not come out of a bottle.

* * * *

She sensed the presence of an unattached male somewhere in the area. She was not sure exactly where he was, but she could tell that he was lonely.

He had been by himself for a very long time. Their kind did not cluster. They needed space to live. But it was not good to be totally alone.

He would find her. No matter how secure her hiding place, he would find her. There could be no secrets between them.

She nuzzled her cubchild. She was as relaxed as she had ever been. She knew instinctively that when they bonded it would be like the ancient times.

There would be more than one child. There would be a litter. That was as it should be.

The sunlight warmed her fur. She looked up and watched a soaring red-tailed hawk riding the thermals across the vault of the sky.

She thought about the childless man whose name was Paul Shudde. He was and was not the Enemy. They had shared pieces of their lives. There was a kind of link between them.

The manthings were not all the same. She had been right about that.

She owed him something. Whatever her life was worth. And she sensed that there was more than that.

There was a partnership here. It was not fully formed and it was something new and untested after all the countless years. It was only a beginning.

The two of them could not change a world much by themselves. But they could make a start. One controlled the immense power of technology. The other saw patterns and had the ingrained cautious wisdom to avoid the catastrophic mistake. Together—

She had no idea where the partnership might take them. She was certain that with a little luck it would go far, far beyond the banks of the San Gabriel River.

There was hope.

Call it that.

She did not know what difference, if any, the existence of one species more or less might make. Her mind did not compute in those terms. She had a sense that when one was saved it was somehow better for all of them.

There was a deep joy in her from being alive. She snuggled down into her nest. She licked her lonechild lazily. It did not lessen her love to understand that in another year or two there would be a litter.

The unbonded male was getting closer. She could feel him.

She thought again of Paul Shudde.

She was happy for him.

Old Four-Eyes was going to have lots of company.