The Furry MEGAPACK® Page 5

  She knew before he nodded, from the way he stared at the floor and would not meet her eyes. A cry escaped her, and the fox turned his muzzle to the wood of the wall. “It was not my bullet, I swear it.”

  Nose buried in her paws, she shook her head. “I would never believe that of you.”

  “He asked…that I come here.”

  Now she lifted her eyes to his, and he could not look away. “You saw him die?”

  Unwilling, he nodded once. “We met before the battle.”

  Claws clicked on the stairs at the back of the hall. A five-year-old coyote cub peered down at the two of them. “Mama?”

  “Go upstairs, Jacob,” she said, putting all the strength into her voice that she could manage. “Mama’ll be up in a moment.”

  John stood awkwardly in front of her, his paws clasped together. He met the cub’s eyes, and then the cub walked slowly back upstairs. When he’d gone, Selah asked, “Are you wounded?” When the fox shook his head, she inclined her head. “Did you desert?”

  John glanced down to the bag at his side, and stretched out his dust-covered bare forearm. “I am no longer a soldier. I do not know quite what I am.”

  She looked at his shoulders hunched inward, the flat ears, the tight curl of his tail, and she reached her arms out and gathered him in.

  He stiffened, and then spread his arms to hold her. He smelled a little like Nathaniel, and Selah wondered if John was thinking the same about her.

  “Well,” he said, and he was wiping as many tears from his eyes as she was from hers when they parted, “I have delivered my news. I promised I would see to his burial.”

  She stared. “You carried his body…”

  “I couldn’t allow him a soldier’s death, an unmarked grave, unconsecrated ground. How would he get into…” He coughed and lowered his head. “He is with the horse. I am staying at the inn.”

  “You can stay here.” She did not know why she said it, only that after two years alone, the prospect of loneliness stretching through the rest of her life filled her with terror and dread.

  “I would not—” John began, and she interrupted.

  “We have room. And I would like to hear about him. Or about the war, what his life must have been like. I—I can tell you about how we spent the years after you left.” When he still hesitated, she turned her nose toward the stairs. “Jacob will want to hear, someday…”

  “That isn’t my—my story to tell.”

  “He has no father, now.” Her voice sharpened. “You owe me at least that much, John Martingale. God brought you back here.”

  He raised his head, and the pain in his eyes frightened her. “I made my own way here. I rode at night, along back roads. I stole food…” His paw tightened around the bag he held at his side.

  Selah touched his arm. “I am offering you a place to rest. Please, stay a while longer.”

  He closed his eyes and lifted his nose. She saw his nostrils flare, and inhaled herself, catching again the small traces of Nathaniel’s scent that would never truly leave this house. Dust drifted from John’s muzzle and ears to the floor. His eyes opened to hers again. “If you are sure…I would like that very much.”

  Boston, 2012

  “So what are we talking here?” The coyote picked up the box lid, tail twitching.

  The raccoon bit her lip. She wanted the uniform, badly, wanted to say, Name your price, but she wasn’t authorized. “There are so few examples…the museum definitely has interest, but I will have to consult with the board to get a proper valuation.”

  “Oh.” The box lid sagged in the coyote’s arms. “Maybe I can just take it to auction, then. I saw this guy got half a million at an auction for an authentic something or other.”

  She smoothed out the uniform with her metal probe. The crackling of paper came to her again, and this time she traced it to one of the pockets. “Most private collectors don’t have the means to properly care for a valuable artifact like this. And they don’t make it available for researchers.”

  “Yeah, but they have more money, right?”

  “Your ancestor kept this jacket and said it was valuable. Wouldn’t you like to know why?” She exchanged glances with the fox, who rolled his eyes. “The museum could analyze some of these traces, the blood, maybe match it to other local families, trace the ancestor and the soldier it belonged to…”

  The coyote just shrugged. “Grandpa’s dead, and I barely know the story. It happened like three hundred years ago, right? I could use the money. My car’s going to shit.”

  She hesitated, and then slid her probe into the pocket. “I think there’s something in here. Do you mind if I take it out? I’d at least like to get a picture for the museum.”

  He frowned, ears going flat for a moment. “That won’t make it less valuable at auction, will it?”

  “I can’t see that it would.” She motioned the fox to move in closer with the camera as she slid the paper free of the pocket.

  Bits of the edge crumbled away despite the raccoon’s caution. The paper had been folded into fourths, but across the brown, aged surface, flowery script in faded ink formed the barely legible words “Discharge from,” and “Royal 8th Regiment,” and below that: “Martingale, red fox.”

  Silence, while they all three read the words. The camera hummed. Then the coyote made a choked noise and reached out, and the raccoon intercepted his paw with her probe. “Please. You could damage the paper.”

  He stared belligerently. “It’s mine.”

  “Hey.” The fox spoke, catching both of their attention. “She’s an expert. If she says you could damage it, keep your paws off.”

  The coyote glared. “You got a problem with me?”

  “No,” the raccoon said quickly. “Please forgive him. He’s just passionate about preserving history. If you want to risk damaging the paper, of course that’s your right.”

  She and the fox watched him struggle. Finally, he turned his eyes up to her. “You say the museum could find out about the uniform? Like, whose…whose blood it is?”

  Slowly, the raccoon nodded. The coyote gestured to the paper. “And you can read that whole thing?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked down at the uniform, at the paper, at the brown, cracked letters, and then his gaze dropped to where his bleached-white tail tip curled around his leg. “Let me think about it a minute.”

  They packed up while the coyote set the lid back on the box. When the video equipment was secured, the fox turned and stuck out a paw. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I was out of line.”

  “No sweat.” The coyote shook. “Used to it from foxes—they see the tail tip and think I’m an asshole. I’m not makin’ fun of your faith, I promise. It’s just a family thing.”

  “It’s okay. I’m not really religious.” The fox tilted his head. “Family thing?”

  “My mom, my aunts and uncles…my cousins and me figured great-something-grandpa was big into the Church. You know, one of those ‘white your tail and get into Paradise’ crowd. But that’s dumb. Sorry!” He held out his paws to the fox.

  “It’s okay. I know what you mean. The white tip is a reminder that at one time someone made a sacrifice for us and so we’re worthy of Paradise. It’s not a free ticket in.”

  “Thought you weren’t religious.” The raccoon nudged him.

  “Grandma is. When I stopped going to church she told me I should paint my tail tip black.” The fox scowled. “Like it would make a difference.”

  “Yeah, so.” The coyote reached down and ran his tail through his paws. “I was thinking I might let the color grow out now Mom’s gone. Or maybe a nice purple or something, ya think?”

  The raccoon favored him with a bright smile. “I think it looks good. You should keep it.”

  He smiled back, meeting her eyes, and his expression softened. “Ah, hell,” he said. “I’ll sell it to the museum. I guess Mom would’ve wanted to know. And I can squeeze another year out of my piece-of-shit Chevy.”
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  “The museum can pay you something.” The raccoon took out her business card and wrote the name and number of the senior acquisitions manager on the back. “Miss Everston will contact you to work out details within the week.”

  He held the card. “Thanks,” he said. “For talking me into it.”

  The raccoon smiled. “You talked yourself into it. If you want to learn more about history, please come on down to the museum.” She raised a paw. “Take care, and thanks so much for your time, Mister Martingale.”

  LUNAR CAVITY, by Mary E. Lowd

  The air was too cold and the gravity too strong. But, Druthel liked the cave-like architecture. He was on the moon-world of Kong-Fuzi, a naked rock without even an atmosphere—only a few small atmo-domes, a scattering of boxy, airtight buildings, and a subterranean tunnel complex connecting them all. It circled the planet Da Vinci, capital of the Human Expansion, and it hosted the renowned and arrogantly named Wespirtech, the Western Spiral Arm Institute of Technology.

  As if humans were the only species with a science institute in the western spiral arm of the galaxy…

  Druthel stretched his long arms, unfurling their expanses of leathery wing-skin, and refolded them about his narrow body in the other order. He lost some of the warmth that his winged arms had been holding in, but the bite of the chilled air against the thin fur on his outer arm had simply become too much.

  “Are you uncomfortable?” the small human administrator asked. It wasn’t the first time he’d shown concern for Druthel’s physical comfort, but there was nothing he could do about the gravity. And there was nothing he chose to do about the temperature.

  “I’ll be fine,” Druthel said, quietly in his own language. A translator clipped to his inadequately warm waistcoat repeated his words in the Solanese that the human would understand. “My home world, however…”

  “Right,” the human said, bristling. “We’ve been working as quickly as we can. This all would have gone much faster if your planet had established terms for scientific trades with the Expansion before…well…”

  Before we needed to, Druthel thought.

  “Nonetheless, my superiors seem to think we can accept the contract in the form we hammered out yesterday,” the human said. “As a preliminary contract anyway.”

  The human’s strange Solanese words, a bizarre, continuous, monotone in Druthel’s tufted black ears, came to life for him as he heard them repeated by the translator. The human smiled thinly as he waited for Druthel’s response. He was expecting a thank you, perhaps. Instead, Druthel said simply, “Then we can begin?”

  “As soon as the team’s ready,” the human said.

  Druthel twitched the leathery nose at the end of his long, brown-furred muzzle. “I will go prepare the ship.” The translator at his waistcoat was still droning away in Solanese as Druthel shuffled, awkwardly in the heavy gravity, out of the administrator’s office. He wandered down the tunnel-like hallway of that foreign moon towards the starship bay where his vessel waited to take him and the team of human scientists he’d come to fetch back to Wrombarra. When the humans were ready, he would fly them triumphantly from this moon to the empty lunar cavity, many light-years away, where the moon that once orbited his homeworld used to be.

  Thinking of the task that awaited them there, Druthel’s arms loosed around his cold body, and his wings began to drag.

  * * * *

  The human scientists with their flat-yet-knobbly pink faces appeared one-by-one in the open door of the airlock to Druthel’s spaceship. He watched each of them spring up the steps from the airlock to the ship’s antechamber as if the gravity here was nothing to them—which, of course, it was. Gravity isn’t especially noticeable until it’s wrong.

  He checked each scientist off in his mind as they arrived. He’d been thoroughly briefed on the scientists he was being sent to fetch. In fact, he’d been intimately involved in picking them. From the holos included in the bios on their various academic publications, he was able to recognize them each on sight: Jon Einray, the hulking male chrono-physicist; Anna Karlingoff, the dun-haired female string-theorist who had invented the elasti-drive; Ivan Bower, the male chemist clinging possessively to Anna’s hand; the four male geologists whose addition to the team depressed Druthel to no end; and, finally…

  There was one scientist missing.

  Druthel followed the group of humans inside to where they were settling into hammocks slung about the spaceship’s central lounge, stowing their bags into netting around the edges of the room. “Excuse me,” Druthel said. “One of you is missing. The one called…” He tried to annunciate the strange Solanese name, but his mouth and tongue simply weren’t formed for it.

  The human called Ivan spoke, and a moment later the translator told Druthel, “Rhiannon? She says she’s not coming. We should go without her.”

  “That is not acceptable.” Druthel shuffled his arms, flapping the expanse of wing stretched between them and his narrow body. The human named Rhiannon was a quantum chemist, one of the least distinguished scientists he’d been sent to fetch, but the one whose previous work had the most bearing on the problem at hand. “One of you will take me to her, yes?” he said.

  Ivan shrugged, but Anna nodded. “Sure,” she said. Then, turning to the chemist who was clearly her mate, “Ivan, go show Druthel the way to Rhiannon’s room.”

  Druthel was inexperienced with human facial expressions, but Ivan seemed less than pleased. The edges of his mouth turned downward as Ivan unwrapped his arms from Anna’s shoulders. “Yeah, sure, it’s this way,” he said, climbing out of the hammock and heading for the ship’s airlock. Druthel followed him off the ship, through the docking bay, and into the corridors of Kong-Fuzi.

  Druthel lost his breath, trying to keep up with the bounding Ivan. He leaned against the hallway walls with unfurled wings, but Ivan only slowed down at the ends of corridors, looking back to make sure Druthel didn’t completely lose his way.

  “This one,” Ivan said, knocking on a slate gray door that sported a scribble-screen on it, covered in colorful, indecipherable Solanese writing. “Hey Rhiannon!” Ivan called through the closed door, “The wrombarr wants to see you!” To Druthel, he said, “The rest’s up to you.” Ivan disappeared back down the hall at the same time as the door to Rhiannon’s room slid open.

  * * * *

  The young woman sitting on the bed was clearly sad. Her wilted posture transcended culture. “You can come in,” she said to the furry-winged alien standing in the door. She heard her voice translated into a series of high pitched chirps and squeals by a device clipped to his clothing. “Sit down,” she said, gesturing to the empty bed across the room from her—another single-size bunk, but this one unclothed with sheets or blankets.

  Druthel shuffled in and contrived to fold his body up onto the strangely flat, horizontal surface. His long, slender limbs angled awkwardly inside the flaps of his wings, but he managed a passable approximation of the way that the human Rhiannon sat on the mirroring bunk.

  She was small. Smaller than the other human scientists, and the long fur that crowned her head was thicker, frizzier. It fell to her shoulders, framing her pale, naked face and completely covering her ears. Druthel’s own ears flicked on the top of his head, reflecting his thoughts as he wondered at what emotions those buried ears might hide.

  “You are not ready?” Druthel asked. Her side of the room was filled with alien looking belongings. But there was nothing that resembled the packed bags that the other scientists had carried onto his ship. “I can help you pack, yes?”

  The slight pink of the lips on Rhiannon’s strangely flat muzzle thinned. “I’m not coming,” she said. “I’m sorry. I thought the others would tell you that.”

  “They did,” Druthel said. “But that is not acceptable.”

  His own lips, along his narrow muzzle tightened as well. For the first time, he felt the layer of fur that covered his face as a kind of shield, hiding the vulnerable expression of emotio
ns beneath. In contrast, flickers of expression danced across the vulnerably bare skin of Rhiannon’s face. Her delicate lips turned down; the skin between her eyes tightened into creases. But for only a moment.

  “There’s nothing you need from me,” she said, “that Anna, Jon, Ivan, and the others can’t provide.”

  “That’s not true—” Druthel began, but Rhiannon continued to speak, the translator chirping away after her.

  “I’ve read the abstract you submitted describing…” she said.

  “And I’ve read all your papers,” Druthel said, not waiting for either Rhiannon or the translator to finish speaking. “They are brilliant…”

  “… the terrible predicament that your world is in…”

  One wromabarr, one human, and two electronic voices from the translator continued to speak until the word “predicament” reached Druthel’s tall, pointed ears.

  “Predicament!” he exclaimed, slicing Rhiannon’s voice to a halt, although the translator continued to chirp and drone away. “You call it only a predicament?”

  She must have heard the distress and despair in his tone, despite the alien nature of his voice. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to…”

  “Our moon is gone,” Druthel said. “The hole it left behind —” His chirpy voice choked away, as he thought of all his friends and family back on Wrombarra. He quickly composed himself. He had a task to do. He must right what had gone wrong. To do that, he needed Rhiannon. “Do you know what kind of effects it has on a planet to suddenly remove such a massive source of gravitational pull?” he asked her.

  Rhiannon lowered her dark eyes.

  “Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes…massive geological instability.” The words were hard to say. He felt that each time he named one of these horrible side-effects that he might be conjuring one to crush loved ones, light years away, back on Wrombarra. “And that is only the beginning…”

  In the silence after his voice trailed off, Rhiannon whispered, “I know.” Her eyes were still downcast. “But, I’m not a geologist. I can’t help with any of that.”