Free Mirabile by Janet Kagan

arms around me and I leaned into him, feeling a little more than cat-smug myself, though I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Maybe because I hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
    “Pretty thing,” Leo said softly, so as not to startle it. “Now I understand why you wanted to keep them.”
    “This time we are keeping them,” I said.
    There was a clatter of the door behind me. The kangaroo rex bounced to the furthest side of the enclosure, hit the fence on the second bounce, and froze, jaws agape and threatening.
    “I know what you’re thinking, Annie,” Mike said. “You’d better come talk to these guys first.
    You’re not going to like what you hear.”
    Herders Jarlskog and Yndurain were not inclined toward leniency, especially not Jarlskog, who had worked himself up into a fine sense of outrage. To hear him tell it, you’d have thought a mob of rexes had eaten his entire flock, plus several of his children. So the entire town was already in an uproar.
    I halfway agreed with their sentiments. I like the occasional lamb chop just as much as the next guy—especially the way Chris cooks them up—and this was one of only seven flocks on all of Mirabile. Sheep here are labor intensive. They can’t be trusted to graze unattended: forever eating something native that’ll poison them. So we keep only the seven flocks and we keep them on a strict diet of Earth fodder.
    All this means that they have to be kept behind fences and that the plant life in there with ‘em has to be policed regularly. That’s one of the reasons all the flocks are on the fringes of the desert—it’s easier to irrigate the plant life into submission.
    The result of all this is that we eat a lot more kangaroo tail soup than we eat lamb curry. The kangaroos fend for themselves quite nicely, thank you, and there’s no shortage of them.
    Jarlskog wanted me to arrange an instant shortage of kangaroo rexes. So did Yndurain. In an hour’s time, the rest of the town would start calling in with the same demand. I Page 29

    soothed them by telling them I’d have a team up there by the end of the day. In the meantime, they were to shoot only if they saw a rex actually in with the sheep.
    They grumbled some but agreed. When I canceled the call, I turned to Leo.
    “What do you think? Will they go right out and shoot every kangaroo in sight?”
    “No,” he said. “Janzen and Moustafa are good kids. I think they can put a damper on the hysteria. Once I convinced Moustafa the rex was mine, he was even willing to help me catch it.”
    “It took a bit of convincing though.” I glanced significantly at his skinned knuckles.
    He grinned and shrugged. “In the heat of passion.” His face turned serious and he added, “He’ll shoot any roo that jumps that fence today, though, so if you want to head up there, now’s the time.”
    Mike handed me a sheaf of hard copy. It was the list of everybody who lived in a hundred-mile radius of the spot where the rex had turned up. “Good news,” he said.
    “We only have to worry about twenty families.”
    That is the only advantage I know of being underpopulated. For a moment, I considered not issuing a general alert. After all, for all we knew, there was only one kangaroo rex and it was in our backyard.
    Mike read my mind and shook his head. “If you want to keep them, Annie, you better not risk having one of them eat some kid.”
    “It was only an idle thought,” I told him. “Put out a notification. Keep the kids in, keep the adults armed. But add that I don’t want them shot unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
    Chie-Hoon said, “Annie, we’re not going to go through this again, are we?”
    “Damn straight, we are,” I said, “and this time I intend to win! Who’s coming with me?”
    “Me,” said Leo.
    “And me,” said Susan, looking up from her monitor. “It z’s the same kangaroo rex as last time, Mama Jason, only I’ve got two secondary helices here. They’re both marsupial,