Mirabile by Janet Kagan Page A

steaming chowder, calling up the odder sample Susan had been working on. She’d found some stuff in the twists all right.
    All the possibilities were herbivorous, though, and I was betting that one of them would match my silly-looking friend in the loch. I giggled again, I’m afraid. I had a pretty good idea what we were dealing with, but I had to be sure before I let those kids back out on the loch.
    By the time we’d finished our chowder, Susan had come charging down the stairs. She punched up the results on my monitor—she was not just fast, she was good.
    I called up ship’s records and went straight to my best guess. At a glance, we had a match but I went through gene by gene and found the one drift.
    “It’s a match!” Ilanith crowed from behind me. “First try, too, Mama Jason!”
    Everybody focused on the monitor. “Look again, kiddo. Only ninety-nine percent match.” I pointed out the drifted genes. “Those mean it can eat your popcorn trees without so much as a stomach upset.”
    Ilanith said, “That’s okay with me. Elly? Do you mind?”

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    “I don’t know,” Elly said. “What it, Annie? Can we live with it?”
    is
    I called up ships’ records on the behavior patterns of the authentic creature and moved aside to let Elly have a look. “I suspect you’ll all have to carry Leo’s secret weapon when you go down to the loch to fish or swim, but other than that I don’t see much of a problem.”
    Leo thumped me on the back. “Damn you, woman, what is it?”
    Elly’d gotten a film that might have been my creature’s twin. She looked taken aback at first, then she too giggled. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve seen in years!
    Come on, Annie, what is it?”
    “Honey, Loch Moose has got its first moose.”
    “No!” Leo shouted, but he followed it with a laugh as he crowded in with the rest to look at the screen.
    Only Susan wasn’t laughing. She caught my hand and pulled me down to whisper, “Will they let us keep it if it’s only ninety-nine percent? It’s not good for anything, like the odders are.”
    I patted her hand. “It’s good for a laugh. I say it’s a keeper.” I was not about to let this go the way of the kangaroo rex.
    “Now I understand why I found her in that state,” Leo was saying. He pointed accusingly at me.
    “This woman was laughing so hard she could scarcely catch her breath.”
    “You didn’t see the damn thing crowned with water lilies and chewing on them while it contemplated the oddity in the boat. You’d have been as helpless as I was.”
    “Unbelievable,” he said.
    “Worse,” I told him, “in this case, seeing isn’t believing. I still can’t believe in something like that. The mind won’t encompass it.”
    He laughed at the screen, then again at me. “Maybe that accounts for your granddaddy’s monster. It was so silly-looking anybody who saw it wouldn’t believe his own eyes.”
    I couldn’t help it—I kissed him on the cheek. “Leo, you’re a genius!”
    He squeaked like Susan. “Me? What did I do?”
    “Elly,” I said, “congratulations! You now have the only lodge on Mirabile with an Earth-authentic Loch Ness monster.” I grinned at Susan, who caught on immediately. I swear her smile started at the mouth and ran all the way down to her toes.
    Feeling rather smug, I went on, “Leo will make bells so your lodgers can scare it away if it gets too close to them, won’t you, Leo?”
    “Oh!” said Leo. He considered the idea. “You know, Annie, it might just work. If everybody went to Loch Ness to try to get a glimpse of the monster, maybe they’ll come here, too. Scary but safe.”
    “Exactly.” I fixed him with a look. “Now how do we go about it?”
    He grinned. “We follow our family traditions: we tell stories.”
    “You think if I hang around for a week or so that’ll make it a safe monster?”
    “Yeah, I think so.”
    “Good,” I said. “Susan? What’s the verdict? Are you going off to the lab? If