Mirabile by Janet Kagan Page B

I’m going to stay here, somebody
    ’ll have to help Mike coddle those red daffodils.”
    No squeak this time. Her mouth dropped open but what came out was, “Uh, yes.
    Uh, Elly?”
    Elly nodded with a smile, sad but proud all in one.
    So while they bustled about packing, I had a chance to read through all the material in ships’
    records on both moose and Nessie. By the time they were ready to leave for town, I had a pretty Page 24

    good idea of our game plan. I sent Susan off with instructions to run a full gene-read on both creatures. Brute force on the moose, to make sure it wouldn’t chain up to something bigger and nastier.
    Then we co-opted the rest of Elly’s kids. Leo gave each of them a different version of our monster tale to tell.
    Jen, I thought, did it best. She got so excited when she told it that her eyes popped and she got incoherent, greatly enhancing the tale of how Leonov Opener Denness had saved Annie Jason Masmajean from the monster in Loch Moose.
    Leo brought bells from his workshop. They’d been intended to keep beastlies away in the northern territory, but there was no reason they wouldn’t do just as good a job against a monster that was Earth-authentic.
    Two days later, the inn was full of overnighters—much to Elly’s surprise and delight—all hoping for a glimpse of the Loch Moose monster.
    In my room, late night and by nova-light, Leo got his first peek at the creature.
    Once again it was swimming in the loch. He stared long and hard out the window.
    After a long moment, he remembered the task we’d set ourselves. “Should I wake the rest of the lodgers, do you think?”
    “No,” I said, “you just tell them about it at breakfast. Anybody who doesn’t see it tonight will stay another night, hoping.”
    “You’re a wicked old lady.”
    I raised Ilanith’s camera to the window. “Yup,” I said, and, twisting the lens deliberately out of focus, I snapped a picture. “Hope that didn’t come out well,” I said.
    If I’d thought that was the end of it, I’d thought wrong.
    Aklilu crawled out from under the covers and bounced once on the edge of the bed. “Now tell me another story, Mama Jason,”
    he said.
    “Another? You want another?”
    I gave a sidelong glance at Elly
    .
    “Another!” shouted Aklilu. “Another!” The bed squealed in time as his bounce got insistent.
    “Come on, Nikolai,” he coaxed.
    “You ask her, too!”
    Good thing all the furniture at Loch Moose Lodge is childproof or there wouldn’t be any. Of course, if he managed to get Nikolai to join in, there’d be nothing left of anything.
    Nikolai looked from me to Elly, then laughed and swept Aklilu into his lap. “Settle down, kiddo,” he said. “I want to hear another story.”
    “Go ahead, Annie,” Elly said. “I know the symptoms.”
    And I know when I’m licked. “Back under the covers with you,” I told Aklilu and, to my surprise, he burrowed back into bed on the spot. “Which one?”
    “You pick,” Nikolai said to Aklilu.
    Aklilu just grinned and cocked his head at me. “You know, Mama Jason.…”
    “
    Yeah,” I said, grinning back. “Same one you always want to hear. But, since Nikolai hasn’t heard it, I guess I could stand to tell it one more time.”

    The Return of the Kangaroo Rex
    « ^ »

Page 25

    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