An Android Dog's Tale by David Morrese

for these things? How could she
have? None of it made any sense, at least not to the android
attempting to listen attentively without appearing to, but it
seemed to make a good deal of sense to the villagers.
    MO-126 increased the sensitivity of his
audio receptors in order to eavesdrop on the nearby villagers
nodding and mumbling among themselves. Their seemingly unanimous
consensus was that Ryenne’s mystical sensitivities detected a
hidden truth. The headman’s sister was undeniably a woman blessed
by the gods and the old woman was obviously possessed by an evil
demon. The android dog briefly wondered if they all suffered from a
form of mass delusion, perhaps caused by some kind of brain-eating
virus.
    “What do you say, Trader?” Gault asked. “Has
my sister the right of it? You travel between villages. You must
have seen cases such as this.”
    “ Tell him it’s all nonsense, ” MO-126
urged his companion. “ Tell him he has to let the old lady free.
We can find out what really happened to the lost sheep. ”
    “I confess I have not,” the trade android
replied, ignoring his partner’s silent pleas. Silent to all but
him, that is. The villagers could not detect radio transmissions.
He could. To them, the very idea would seem like magic.
    “Well, I suppose my sister is unique. She
has always been…” the village headman paused to find the
appropriate word and finally located one that would
do…“different.”
    “ She’s always been crazy, he means, ”
MO-126 said to Tork. “ Tell him! ”
    “She does seem to have a rare ability,” the
humanoid android said to the headman. “The way she linked all of
those events and came to the conclusion she did is not something
most people could do, I suspect.”
    “ Well, that much is true, ” the
android dog said. “ She should swap places with Galinda. Ryenne’s
the one that’s dangerous. ”
    “ Shut up, MO-126, ” the trade android
transmitted.
    “True,” the headman said, unknowingly
agreeing with the artificial canine on that single point. “I know I
never would have made those connections. But now that she has,
well, I suppose it all makes sense.”
    MO-126 briefly wondered if he could shock
the village leader back to reality by biting him but concluded he
could not. The headman lived in a different reality. It might not
be quite as far away as his sister’s, but in the headman’s world,
demons could live in an old woman and steal sheep. In the
android’s, people could be irrational and sheep could wander off on
their own without any supernatural assistance. The two realities
touched in some places, but they were lightyears apart in
others.
    The trader surprised his furry partner when
he asked what would happen to the old woman, a question probably
prompted more by idle curiosity than by any concern for her
welfare.
    “Isn’t it obvious?” Ryenne answered. “The
demon must be driven from her.”
    “How will you do that?” Tork asked her.
    “I’ve been giving that some thought,” she
replied. “The demon is there because it’s comfortable. We have to
make it uncomfortable. It feels what Galinda feels, so I think we
can make it want to leave her.”
    Translated, that meant they would beat,
starve, and leave the old woman tied to a pole until Ryenne,
through mystical means of her own, determined it was safe to
release her.
    “I see,” the trader said. “Well, I wish you
good luck with that. For now, I have some things I’m sure you
need—fish hooks, needles, rope, and some new tools. Let’s go back
to my gond and I’ll show you what I brought.”
    “ Why didn’t you tell Gault his sister is
nuts? ” MO-126 said to Tork as they turned back toward their
pack animal.
    “ Because we are not here to educate the
primitives. We’re here to support the project, and so are they.
Don’t let yourself be distracted from that. Their belief in demons
doesn’t harm the project; in fact, it supports it. As long as they
continue to try to