We Install (8 page)

“I will get the brain.” The smaller Snarre' went out to the drof and stroked it. A pouch opened. If Baba Yaga were a kangaroo instead of a chicken … But the edge of the pouch had teeth, or something an awful lot like them. The Snarre't discouraged drof thieves.

Back came the alien. He—she?—put the brain on the counter. It looked up at Jack out of disconcertingly Snarre'-like eyes.
Have to keep it in the dark
, he thought. A tagline floated through his mind:
and feed it bullshit
. It was about the size of a basketball, with two little arms and four little legs. Its fur was molting here and there. It looked like something that had seen better days.

“What
do
I feed it?” Jack asked.

“Here is about ten days' worth of brain food.” The Snarre' set a membranous sack on the counter by the brain. “You can get more from any of our merchants.” Another, smaller, sack went by the first one. “And here, because you have shown yourself to be congenial, are some spices for flavoring your food. They are not harmful to your kind. It is likely—not certain, for taste is never certain—you will find them flavorsome. They are a gift. We ask nothing in return for them.”

That was also polite. Even so, Jack said, “Well, thank you very much. Let me give you my stapler here.” It was the first thing he saw on his desk. He showed them what it was for, and threw in a box of staples.

They seemed happy enough with the theoretically optional return gift. He wondered how they held papers together. Pointy twigs? Bugs with sharp noses? Something biological—he was sure of that.

They took their copy of the contract. One of them got on the scooter. The other tethered the drof to the new purchase. Away they went. Jack got on the phone. “Made the sale. On my way. See you soon.”

“Oh, good,” Bev said. “I didn't start after all, but I was going to pretty soon.”

“Back as quick as I can,” Jack told her. “'Bye.”

His own scooter was parked out front. He eyed the brain, which was sitting on the counter. It looked back at him. Did it know it belonged to him now? If it did, what did it think of that? Rather more to the point, how was he supposed to get it home without hurting it?

He found a cardboard box and put the brain into it. To his relief, it didn't kick up a fuss. It said something in Snarre'l. The babelfish gave Jack gibberish. “It'll be okay, honest,” he said in English, and hoped he wasn't lying. Did the brain understand? Whether it did or not, it kept quiet. That would do.

Jack set the box between his knees as he got on the scooter. That was the best way he could think of to keep it safe. As soon as he put in the key, the scooter's electric motor whispered to life. Getting home to Bev made him want to speed up. Protecting the brain made him want to slow down. He probably ended up somewhere in the middle.

He could tell the second he left Latimer's mixed-race central business district and got back to the human-settled east side of town. Street lights became bright enough to be useful. He turned the rheostat on the headlight switch and lifted his goggles onto his forehead. Now he could really see where he was going. The Snarre't might be nocturnal, but he wasn't.

The brain was. As the lights brightened, it made a small, whimpering noise. It was taking in more glare than it could handle. He put his riding jacket over the top of the box. The brain stopped whining, so he supposed he'd done the right thing.

He stopped at a traffic light—one more reminder he was in the human part of Latimer. Another scooter pulled up alongside his. “Hey, Jack!” the man on it said. “How you doing?”

“Oh, hello, Petros,” Jack answered. Petros van Gilder lived around the corner from him. He sold a rival firm's scooters. They forgave each other their trespasses. Jack went on, “I'm tolerable. How's by you?”

“Fair to partly cloudy,” van Gilder answered. “What's in the box?”

“Snarre'i brain. I sold 'em a two-seater, and this is what I got for it.”

“Not too shabby.” Petros stuck out his hand, which he'd kept in the pocket of his riding jacket. “Way to go. I had a near miss with the Furballs the other day, but I couldn't close the deal. Congrats.”

“Thanks.” Jack shook hands with him. “Yeah, that ought to make the firm a tidy little profit once I sell it to the right people. Some left over for me, too.”

“There you go,” Petros said. The light turned green, and he zoomed off. Jack would have, too, if not for the brain in the box. He followed more sedately. Van Gilder would get home ahead of him tonight.

He parked in front of the house when he did arrive. One of Lacanth C's big selling points for human colonists was that it was roomy enough for every family to enjoy its own house and lot. That was one more thing the Snarre't didn't grok. Most of them lived in apartment warrens. They liked crowding together. Smells meant more to them than they ever would to humans.

Come on now, dear. Let's sniff the Hendersons' butts.
To humans, the talking dogs made a classic T-shirt. The Snarre't wouldn't have got the joke, because they really did stuff like that.

Cravath carried the box to the house. He kept his jacket over it, because the lights were bright—if you were something (someone?) the Snarre't had bioengineered. He unlocked the front door and let himself in. “Hi, hon!” he called. “I'm home!”

“What have you got there?” Beverly asked. She was short and blond and plump, and worked for a quantum-mantic outfit that would have to learn to do without her before too long.

He explained about the brain again. She was suitably impressed. He told the house to turn down the lights. “Now I can uncover it without hurting its eyes,” he said.

He tossed the jacket on a chair. Bev peered down at the brain. “It looks so sad,” she said.

“I thought the same thing. I'll give it some food. Maybe that'll perk it up. Would you get some water for it, too, please?”

Bev did, in a plastic cup. The brain ate and drank. It still looked sad after it finished. Jack was happy after chicken stew and a bottle of beer. He tried some of the Snarre'i spices in the stew. He liked them. Bev stayed away from them even so, for fear that anything alien wouldn't be good for a rapidly growing fetus. She didn't drink any beer, either, and she liked it.

They celebrated the sale of the scooter back in the bedroom. The brain stayed in its box in the kitchen. Did it know what was going on at the other end of the house? If it did, it couldn't do a damn thing about it.
Poor thing
, Jack thought.

Did brains mate with other brains to make more brains? Or did the Snarre't clone them one at a time from a genetic template marked
brain
? Cravath had no idea. Was the brain in the box male or female? Or, if it was a clone, had the Snarre't bioengineered all the complications of sexuality out of it? If they had …
Poor thing
, Jack thought again.

Well, he was going to sell it to the humans best equipped to take care of it. How well would the Snarre't have cared for an aging indoor cat? That comparison didn't occur to Jack, or he probably would have thought
Poor thing
one more time.

He got almost as much for the brain as he hoped he would. The retail price for which he would have sold the scooter to humans went into the firm's account. The rest went into his. Were the tall Snarre' and the shorter one making similar arrangements? Had they bought the scooter for themselves, or were their engineers tearing the tires and the powerpack to pieces, trying to figure out how they worked?

That wasn't his worry. Neither was the brain, not any more.

He and Bev used the extra credit in his account to take a South Coast vacation. They lay in the sun and swam in the sea. He drank drinks with plastic rocketships in them. She stuck to fruit nectars and occasional sips stolen from his mugs. She was being good for the baby's sake. He admired her for that.

When they got home, a genetics scan showed that it was a boy, and that it suffered from none of the 400 commonest genetic syndromes. That scan came free with their medical coverage. If they wanted to check for the next 400, they would have to pay for the test. Beverly looked up the incidence rate of syndrome 401. It was named for four twenty-first-century doctors, and occurred, the data net said, once in every 83,164,229 births.

“What do you think?” she asked Jack.

“Your call, babe. We can afford it if you want to do it,” he said. If, God forbid, anything really rare was going on, he didn't want her blaming him for not looking into it.

But she smiled and shook her head. “If you worry about odds like that, you probably snap your fingers to keep the elephants away.” Jack snapped his. They both laughed. The closest elephants to Lacanth C were a lot of light-years away, so snapping your fingers worked like a charm there.

And that secondary scan wouldn't have picked up what was going on, anyhow. Neither would a tertiary scan, or a quaternary. …

The ultrasound very clearly showed the baby's heart. As for the rest … The tech examining the image frowned a little. “You've got a wiggly kid,” she said. “He twisted himself into a really funny position.”

“Is everything all right?” Bev asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” the tech answered. “Maybe you want to come in for another check a little closer to term.”

“Well, maybe I will,” Beverly said. But she didn't. The tech didn't make it sound like a big deal, and so she didn't worry about it. Her OB seemed to think everything was fine. The fetal heartbeat came in loud and clear. Junior—she and Jack were going to name him Sean—sure kicked like a soccer player.

Both new parents were as ready as new parents could be when labor started. It took a long time, but they were braced for that. It hurt, too, but Bev knew ahead of time that it would, which made a lot of difference. When she finally got the urge to push, the OB told her to go ahead.

“Won't be much longer,” the woman said cheerfully from behind her mask. Bev made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a squeal—she might have been trying to lift a building off her toe. The OB nodded approval. “That's good! Do it again!”

Jack thought his wife would explode if she did it again. But then, that was the point.

Bev bore down once more. Her face turned a mottled purple. That couldn't be good for her … could it? The obstetrician seemed to think so. “The baby's crowning,” she said. “I can see the top of its head. Push hard. One more time!”

And Beverly did, and the baby came out, and that was when the screams in the delivery room started.

Sergeant John Paul Kling was in the shower when the telephone rang. Swearing under his breath, he turned off the water and plucked the phone out of the soap dish. “Exotic Crimes Unit, Kling here,” he said.

“This is Dr. Romanova. I'm at Tristar Hospital.” The woman on the other end of the line sounded like someone biting down hard on hysteria.
And she's a doctor
, Kling thought.
Whatever this is, it isn't good
.

“Go ahead,” he said out loud, while water dripped from the end of his nose and trickled through the mat of graying hair on his chest.

“I think …” Dr. Romanova had to pause and gather herself. “I think we've had a hoxbomb here.” There. She'd said it.

“Good Lord!” Kling didn't know what he'd expected, but that wasn't it. “Are you sure?”

“I'll send you the image,” she said, and she did.

For a few seconds, Kling thought he was seeing what he was seeing because his phone screen had drops of water on it. He wiped it clear with his thumb, and what he saw then was even worse.

It was a newborn baby. Well, it couldn't be anything else, but whoever'd put it together hadn't looked at the manual often enough. Parts sprouted from places where they had no business being. He'd heard of sticking your foot in your mouth. Now he saw it—either that or the kid's tongue had toes. Which would be worse? He had no idea.

“Sergeant? Are you there, Sergeant?” Dr. Romanova asked. “They put me through to you, and—”

“I'm here.” Kling got rid of the photo, but it would haunt him forever. And he was going to have to see the model in a few minutes. “Tristar Hospital, you said? I'm on my way. Shall I notify the Snarre't, or do you want to do it?”

“You're the police office in charge,” she answered, which was a polite way of saying,
You're stuck with it, buddy
. “A hoxbomb
could
be purely human, of course.”

“Yeah. Right,” John Paul Kling said tightly. He was a cop. Like any cop with two brain cells to rub against each other, he went with the odds, not against them. A hoxbomb didn't have to mean the Furballs were involved, but that was sure as hell the way to bet. They were the ones who really knew how to do that stuff: a lot better than humans did, anyhow.

He got out of the shower, put on his clothes, and called headquarters. He would have to show them visuals, and naked just didn't cut it. Lieutenant Reiko Kelly took the call. “I thought it would be you, John Paul,” she said. “A hoxbomb, the doctor told me.”

“Uh-huh. I'm about to head for Tristar now. Reason I'm checking in is, I want to involve the Snarre't.” He was doing things by the book. Being only a sergeant, he needed formal permission before taking care of what everybody—even the doctor, or maybe especially the doctor—could see he had to take care of.

Lieutenant Kelly sighed, but she nodded. “Yes, go ahead. With a hoxbomb in the picture, you don't have much choice. If it turns out they aren't involved, we can always peel them out of the investigation later.”

“Okay. We're on the same page, anyhow,” Kling said. “I'll make the contact. Boy, that'll be fun. Fun like the gout, is what it'll be. So long, Reiko. Talk with you later.” He hopped on his scooter and headed for the hospital.