Free The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick Page A

taken hours for the city/entity to come to terms with the alien concepts she’d dumped upon it. Human beings thought and lived at a much slower rate than it did. How long would those hours translate into human time? Months? Years? Centuries? It had spoken of scars and rebuilding. That didn’t sound good at all.
    Then the robofish accelerated, so quickly that Lizzie almost lost her grip. The dark waters were whirling around her, and unseen flecks of frozen material were bouncing from her helmet. She laughed wildly. Suddenly she felt
great!
    “Bring it on,” she said. “I’ll take everything you’ve got.”
    It was going to be one hell of a ride.

Triceratops Summer
    THE DINOSAURS LOOKED all wobbly in the summer heat shimmering up from the pavement. There were about thirty of them, a small herd of what appeared to be
Triceratops
. They were crossing the road — don’t ask me why — so I downshifted and brought the truck to a halt, and waited.
    Waited and watched.
    They were interesting creatures, and surprisingly graceful for all their bulk. They picked their way delicately across the road, looking neither to the right nor the left. I was pretty sure I’d correctly identified them by now — they had those three horns on their faces. I used to be a kid. I’d owned the plastic models.
    My next-door neighbor, Gretta, who was sitting in the cab next to me with her eyes closed, said, “Why aren’t we moving?”
    “Dinosaurs in the road,” I said.
    She opened her eyes.
    “Son of a bitch,” she said.
    Then, before I could stop her, she leaned over and honked the horn, three times. Loud.
    As one, every
Triceratops
in the herd froze in its tracks, and swung its head around to face the truck.
    I practically fell over laughing.
    “What’s so goddamn funny?” Gretta wanted to know. But I could only point and shake my head helplessly, tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks.
    It was the frills. They were beyond garish. They were as bright as any circus poster, with red whorls and yellow slashes and electric orange diamonds — too many shapes and colors to catalog, and each one different They looked like Chinese kites! Like butterflies with six-foot wing-spans! Like Las Vegas on acid! And then, under those carnival-bright displays, the most stupid faces imaginable, blinking and gaping like brain-damaged cows. Oh, they were funny, all right, but if you couldn’t see that at a glance, you never were going to.
    Gretta was getting fairly steamed. She climbed down out of the cab and slammed the door behind her. At the sound, a couple of the
Triceratops
pissed themselves with excitement, and the lot shied away a step or two. Then they began huddling a little closer, to see what would happen next.
    Gretta hastily climbed back into the cab. “What are those bastards up to now?” she demanded irritably. She seemed to blame me for their behavior. Not that she could say so, considering she was in my truck and her BMW was still in the garage in South Burlington.
    “They’re curious,” I said. “Just stand still. Don’t move or make any noise, and after a bit they’ll lose interest and wander off.”
    “How do you know? You ever see anything like them before?”
    “No,” I admitted. “But I worked on a dairy farm when I was a young fella, thirty, forty years ago, and the behavior seems similar.”
    In fact, the
Triceratops
were already getting bored and starting to wander off again when a battered old Hyundai pulled wildly up beside us, and a skinny young man with the worst-combed hair I’d seen in a long time jumped out. They decided to stay and watch.
    The young man came running over to us, arms waving. I leaned out the window. “What’s the problem, son?”
    He was pretty bad upset. “There’s been an accident — an
incident
, I mean. At the Institute.” He was talking about the Institute for Advanced Physics, which was not all that far from here. It was government-funded and affiliated in some way I’d