Free An Android Dog's Tale by David Morrese Page A

trader’s comment may have been prompted
by the fact that Gault just told her that she was being
unreasonable. Three sheep and three new lambs were not things to be
dispensed with needlessly.
    “Better these six than all our flock,” she
told him.
    “But how can we know for sure?” Gault
protested. “They don’t appear possessed to me.”
    “I already know for sure, Gault. The gods
speak to me, remember?”
    “Well, yes. But how can I know for
sure?”
    “Don’t be stupid. You can know because I
told you.”
    Whereas this might have been sufficient
explanation for him to allow an old woman to be beaten and starved,
quite possibly to death, it did not provide a strong enough reason
to sacrifice six sheep. He cautiously approached the small flock
MO-126 continued to watch over. The three adult sheep glanced at
the village headman, perhaps recognizing him as their owner. The
lambs stayed by their mothers, completely failing to do anything
overtly demonic.
    “They look like normal lambs to me, Ryenne,”
Gault called back to his sister. She did not accompany him to
examine the demon animals.
    “That’s what they want you to think,” she
said from a safe distance. “I can feel the evil in them from
here.”
    Gault reached out to pet one of the lambs.
Its mother let him. The lamb bleated, “Maaa,” and stuck out its
tongue. It was not forked. There were no visible fangs. It did not
vomit pea soup or twist its head around. It did have strange,
horizontal pupils, but all sheep had those.
    “I think this one is all right,” the village
headman said. He examined the other two and then the adult sheep.
“I think they’re all fine. Your demons must have left.”
    “They’re not my demons! They’re here
because of Galinda. And how would you know, anyway? You’ve never
been able to hear the voices or see the visions. I can feel the
demons in them, I tell you. They’re there. Get away from them
before they call one into you, too!”
    The android dog cocked his head, desperately
trying to see things from her perspective, and failing. Dogs, as a
rule, have less imagination than humans do, and their manufactured
likenesses shared this trait. They just saw things that were really
there and did not feel compelled to invent stories to explain them.
In this case, he felt both of the humans were wrong. They were
Ryenne’s demons, and they were still alive and well. They just were
not what or where they thought they were.
    The headman took a step back at her warning
and then looked at his sister, and then at his sheep, and then at
his sister again. MO-126 did not know the village headman well, but
he seemed a pragmatic sort. His analytical expression made the
android dog suspect that he was mentally comparing the relative of
value of six healthy sheep to that of one deranged woman.
    Gault approached the sheep again and
examined them more thoroughly, despite his sister’s continued
cautions. If Tork understood the primitives’ worldview as well as
he implied, Ryenne’s inner visions would be as real to Gault as the
images his own eyes revealed. Possibly better because he only saw
the surface of things while she saw the spirits beneath. This added
to the fact that the sheep were just sheep and she was family led
MO-126 to suspect that both the sheep and the old woman back in the
village would not live much longer.
    The headman reached his decision. “The sheep
are fine, Ryenne. They’re coming back with us.”
    On the other hand, sheep are valuable, and
once dead, they stay dead. There remained some chance his sister
would come to her senses.
    “Oh, no. Now the demons have you, too,” she
whimpered. She turned to Master Trader Tork and clutched the sleeve
of his tunic. “You must stop him,” she pleaded.
    The trade android patted her shoulder
benignly the way a nursery android might comfort a small child.
“Why?” he asked.
    She searched his artificial eyes, which
gazed back at her with apparent innocence. A look