Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 12

His plates were purple and a little orange at the center. His head is more beak-shaped than rounded off."

He stood with his hands in the pockets of his slacks, refusing to sit on the bench. "My brother named him Elliot."

Axel made a hissing, gasping sort of sound. "Elliot!"

"A lot of saurs changed their names once we offered them shelter here." My mustache brushed my lower lip. "I can't keep track of whose name was given and whose was chosen, but we do have a saur here named Elliot who fits that description. Do you want to see him?"

"Yes!" His reply was so emphatic it seemed to startle him.

"You understand, I hope, that I'll first have to check with Elliot. Would you be disappointed if Elliot didn't want to see you?"

"I don't know." He returned to his previous, severe expression. "I don't understand a lot about this operation."

"The point," I said, "is this: many of these guys were extremely traumatized before they got here. Some of them were barely alive. You didn't have to have personally hurt him to remind him of days he'd rathernot remember. That's why I need to check with Elliot first."

"I don't really understand." He tugged his slacks at the knees before finally taking a seat. "They're just toys, aren't they?"

"If that were true, would you be here?"

He looked away and exhaled with a hint of frustration. "Okay. Whatever."

I took him inside.

The visitor was surprised at the number of saurs gathered around the video screen. They were now watching Chaplin in Modern Times.

"How many you got here?"

"Ninety-eight in this house, all counted, which isn't a lot considering how many were made. Some folks wonder why the foundation set up houses for the saurs. Why not reservations or preserves? They forget that saurs don't have a 'natural' environment other than a house. They were designed to be domestic."

And yet, when children tired of their saurs and stopped taking care of them, their parents drove them out to the woods or to parks and dumped them. It was worse than dumping cats or dogs: they at least had some vague instincts to work with. The saurs pretty much had to start from scratch, which is why so many of them starved, froze, were run over by vehicles or were eaten by predators.

I wondered if any of the saurs' designers ever imagined their creations would end up in a house like this. They had guaranteed the investors, the executives, and the buying public that the saurs were limited to a relatively few responses and reactions. They were supposed to be organic computers, and very simple ones at that. They could remember names and recognize faces, engage in simple conversations.

They would sing the "Dinosaur Song" (a hideous thing that started "Yar-wooo, yar-wooo, yar-wooo/the dinosaurs love you-"), and if you told one you were sad he would know how to respond with a joke.

Yes, the designers said, they were sophisticated creations, almost miraculous, a high point in what they had mastered by tweaking a few genes-but they were not to be confused with living things. They could respond to stimuli, they could retain data, but that doesn't make something a "living" thing, they said.

A bell rang in the library.

"Hetman! Hetman!" Axel squirmed around under my arm.

But just then I heard another commotion in the kitchen. Agnes was shouting. I excused myself from the visitor and entered the kitchen just in time to see Jean-Claude on the sink with Pierrot on his back, trying to open the freezer door.

"Hey!" Agnes shouted at them. "You idiots get down from there!"

"Honestly, guys." I helped the two of them back down onto the floor. "Couldn't you wait until lunch?

You know you can't eat uncooked meat."

"Nooo," Pierrot corrected me. "We-were just-guarding, yeah-guarding the meat, in case the visitor tried to steal it!"

"I wish someone would steal you," Agnes grunted.

"The visitor steals Pierrot!" Axel yelled. "He takes him and he throws him down a well-and he's falling-falling-falling-AAAAAAHHHHhhhh!"

"Look what you started," I said to Agnes.

"It was a bad idea to create carnosaurs," Agnes sighed. "It's meat. Meat equals stupid. It must be."

Jean-Claude and Pierrot ran out of the kitchen, Agnes went back to her hiding place, and Axel quieted down.

The visitor had moved on to the dining room when I returned. He watched the group gathered around the Reggiesystem computer. On the screen was an animated version of a rocket taking off, moving farther and farther away from the planet.

"Where is the s.p.a.ceship going?" asked the steady, soft Reggiesystem voice.

The question set off a little conference among the gathered saurs. Tyrone, a hamster-sized theropod, bent over and listened as Alfie, his constant buddy, whispered to him.

"The Walkuere s.p.a.ce station?" Tyrone replied.

"Correct." The Reggiesystem played a little synthesized melody. The other a.s.sembled saurs cheered. The visitor watched, two fingers pressed against his lips.

"Some of the saurs are quite clever," I told him. "Some not so. Some can speak very well. Some can't. The problem is that you can't always a.s.sume which are which. Some saurs who can speak choose not to. Some are still too traumatized."

Axel waved to Alfie and Tyrone.

"They all seem hooked up in some way," the visitor observed, "like they have mates and children and whatever else. They're supposed to be as.e.xual, aren't they?"

I shrugged. "These attachments they make to each other have baffled everyone who's studied them.

Reproductively they're supposed to be neuter, but one saur will call another a spouse, or a parent, or an offspring, or a sibling, as if the need to establish familial connections transcends genetics. Who knows?

Their designers know less about them now than when they first created them.

"Take their life span. They were supposed to live for five years, tops. Doc over there is twenty-eight.

And Agnes under the table is twenty-five."

"How dare you!" Agnes barked. "Tell him everything, why don't you?"

There were things I wouldn't mention to the visitor, or to anyone else. Like Bronte, sitting on the couch, warming the orphan bird eggs that Sluggo brings to her. Some of them hatch, and Sluggo feeds them-little robins and sparrows and finches-until they're big enough to fly from the window ledge.

And then there's the egg I found Bronte with the other day, the one that doesn't resemble any bird egg I've ever seen.

In the library, the visitor saw saurs reading, talking, listening to the radio. Fred and Ginger practiced a dance. The Five Wise Buddhasaurs hooked up their plastic horns to a synthesizer, so that their instruments sounded full-sized. Their cacophonies only occasionally coalesced into some charming harmonies.

Over in the far corner of the library, where the sun came through the windows most directly, Hetman rested on his little bed. Hermione, an apatosaur, stood nearby, watching over him.

"It's okay," she said. "A bad dream."

"S-s-orry," hissed Hetman. "I didn't mean to disturb anyone. I rang the bell in my sleep."

"Jesus," the visitor whispered as he got a look at Hetman.

Hetman's been in the little bed ever since he came here. His hind legs were crushed under some vehicle; his fore-limbs were hacked off and his eyes burned out. No one thought he'd live more than a few days when he was found, if that, but he's been here many years now.

"Don't be sorry, Hetman," I said. "Someone is always here. Whatever you need, we'll get."

"I'm here!" Axel squirmed under my arm again. "I'll get for Het! I'll stay! Can I stay? Want me to stay with you, Hetman?"

"Yes, Axel," Hetman said with a raspy whisper. "Keep me from falling asleep again. Tell me once more all about the tidal wave."

I put Axel down next to Hetman.

The lines in the visitor's forehead looked deeper, the little "V" looked like it had been carved in.

"Who could do a thing like that?"

I didn't answer. Such questions, even when rhetorical, are meaningless. The saurs were sent out into the world with simple physiologies that demanded a few food pellets, water, and a litter box. Sweet natures, a few prepared phrases, a few songs. They were delivered into the hands of wealthy parents who bought them as much to show their neighbors they could afford them as to please their children. The children were told the saurs were toys and the children played with them like they were toys-which meant many of the saurs were suffocated, drowned, starved, crushed, beaten, vivisected. I can go on for hours, cataloging cruelties, tragedies, mistakes: how Hubert, tortured to the point of near madness, decided to use his tyrannosaurian teeth and claws to defend himself and was almost destroyed for it; how Diogenes had been shown a box of food pellets by the father who bought him and was told, "When these run out, so do you." There were stories like that behind nearly every small, strange-shaped, puzzled, puzzling face in this house.

Had I come from a more affluent background, would I have done the same? I felt too honest toanswer either way.

I led the visitor upstairs.

"This place would drive me nuts," he said softly. "How could the people who made these things not know?"

He looked so appalled by what he'd seen of Herman, I gave him the best answer I could think of for free. "In those days, designers thought of each little piece of the genome, each little element, as a symbol, like a letter printed on a wooden block. Each letter, they thought, had a simple denotative definition.

When you placed the C next to the A and followed them with T, you could spell 'cat.' That it might all be a little more complicated didn't occur to them."

The visitor took the stairs slowly, carefully reviewing each step. "So, these engineers learned their lesson, huh?"

"They think so."

We pa.s.sed the dark little bedroom where Tibor keeps his cardboard castle. It's really quite a shambles, but Tibor, a runt of an apatosaur with a stern Beethoven-like face, sits there all day and hatches Napoleonic schemes. On the other side of the room sits a cardboard box on a dresser which Geraldine, another runt, calls her "lab." Nothing has happened with any of her experiments so far, but I keep two fire extinguishers in the room anyway.

Elliot and his mate, Syrena, a bright red stegosaur, hang out in a bedroom on the second floor with Preston, a chunky, round-headed theropod.

"If you could wait here a moment," I said to the visitor, "I'll check with Elliot."

Preston worked away slowly but determinedly on a computer keyboard with his tiny two-digit-each forepaws. I described the visitor to Elliot and asked if he'd mind seeing him. He thought for a moment, looking to Syrena for advice.

"It must be Danny," Elliot said, his voice so soft it would make a whisper sound like an outcry. "I told you about him. Danny never did anything bad to me, except-leave me."

He pressed closer to his mate and rubbed his face against hers. "I'll see him, if he wants to see me."

When I brought the visitor in he was momentarily distracted by Preston at his keyboard. He read over his shoulder:

"By dawn the crowd in the Plaza had swelled to ten thousand. The Amba.s.sador had an excellent view of the frenzied mult.i.tude from his window. They all wore their red bandannas and stoked the air above them with their banners, chanting that the world of Lorair was their birthright..."

"This is his eighth novel," I told the visitor.

"He publishes them?"

"Not under his own name."

But then he saw Elliot, and his old expression completely evaporated. It seemed to reveal, maybe for the first time in years, a wound as deep as the scar on Axel's back.

"Elliot?"

"Danny?"

The visitor bent down until his head was nearly resting on the desk's mahogany top.

"Been a long time," the visitor mumbled.

Elliot nodded apprehensively.

The visitor looked up at me first, then at the other saurs in the room.

"Would it-" he started. "Is there somewhere Elliot and I could talk alone for a little while?"

I gestured to the others and helped them out into the hallway. "It won't be for long," I said to them.

And to Elliot: "We'll be right outside if you need anything."

As I shut the door I looked down to see Agnes staring up at me, her expression as hard as a Brazil nut.

"It's all right," I told her. "Nothing's going to happen."

I hoped I was right. That was my responsibility: to make sure nothing happened. Agnes kept lookingat me. Her tail tapped against the floor. Behind her gathered a number of curious saurs, including all the biggest guys: Doc, Diogenes, Hubert, and Sam.

"Nothing will happen," said Doc, staring coolly at the closed door. "If it does, it won't be without someone feeling great regret."

I knew that "someone" didn't mean me, but still my breathing quickened.

The saurs waited quietly, except for Agnes, still thrumming with her tail.

When the door finally opened it did so slowly. The visitor came out, looking a little flushed, his skin a little shinier.

"Hey, Elliot!" Agnes shouted back into the room. "You all right?"

I wiped some sweat from my brow and escorted the visitor back to his Mercedes. He said nothing until he got back into his car.

"Thanks." That was it.