Something shifted in the darkness under the trees. The dogs stepped into the light, walking toward her with slow, careful steps. The bulbous eyes apologetic.
“Was this you?” Cara breathed. “Did you do this?”
The dogs didn’t answer. They only folded their complex legs and rested for a moment, looking toward Cara. She leaned over, stretched out a hand, and pet the closest one on the top of its head, where the ears would have been if it had been the kind of dog they had on Earth. Its skin was hot to the touch, soft with hard underneath, like velvet laid over steel. It made a gentle humming sound, and then all of them rose up together and turned back toward the trees. Cara stood up and walked after them, not sure what she wanted except that there was a sudden urgency in her heart. They couldn’t leave. Not yet.
“Wait,” she said. And the dogs stopped. They waited. “Can you…can you help me?”
They turned toward her again, their movements eerily synchronized. In the distance, something trilled and buzzed and trilled again.
“You fixed Momma bird,” she said, nodding toward the pond. “Can you fix other things too?”
The dogs didn’t move, but they didn’t turn away either. Cara held up a finger in a don’t-go-away gesture, and moved off to the bushes. The sampling drone was just where she’d left it. Something small had scattered the shattered bits a little, but they were all still there, as far as she could tell. She lifted up the broken machine, its limp, deactivated limbs clacking against each other. The shards she plucked up into her palm.
The dogs watched, motionless. Their constant embarrassed expression now seemed to offer some sympathy, as if feeling her shame at having broken the drone. One of the dogs came forward, and she thought it was the lead from before, though she couldn’t be sure. She knelt and held out the drone. She expected the eerie ki-ka-ko noise again, but the dog only opened its mouth a little. What she’d taken for teeth, she saw, were really just little nubs, like the gripping surface on a wheel made for off-road travel. It had no tongue. There was no throat at the back of its mouth. It made her think of the dinosaur puppet Xan used to love. It leaned forward, taking the drone in its jaws. The little machine hung limp.
A second dog stepped forward, tapping Cara’s hand with one wide paw. Cara opened her shard-filled hand. The dog leaned forward, wrapping its mouth around her palm. Something in the touch tingled like a mild electrical shock or the first contact of a caustic chemical. The dog’s mouth rippled against her skin, sweeping the shards away. She kept her hand flat until all the bits and pieces were gone and the dog leaned back. Her hand was clean apart from a brief scent of disinfectant, gone almost before she noticed it.
“Thank you,” she said as the dog stepped carefully into the darkness under the trees. The one with the drone in its grip turned back to look at her, as if it was embarrassed by her gratitude but felt obligated to acknowledge it. Then they were gone. She listened to the receding footsteps. They went silent more quickly than she’d expected.
She sat quietly, arms wrapped around her legs, and watched the weird miracle of the dead-but-not-dead sunbird until she felt like she’d given the moment all of the honor and respect it deserved.
Like someone rising from a pew, she stood, peace in her heart, and headed back home. As she walked, she imagined telling her parents about the dogs, about Momma bird. But that would mean telling them about the drone too. After it was fixed, she’d tell them. And anyway, it was still too sweet having it just for herself.
* * *
“I don’t know,” her mother said. “I don’t feel comfortable with it.”
Xan’s eyes got large. His mouth gaped like she’d just said the worst, most unexpected thing he’d ever heard. “Mom!”
It was Sunday, and the walk into town for church was warm, the air thick and sticky. A soft midnight rain had left the track muddy and slick, so Cara kept to the edge where moss and clover made a kind of carpet. The tiny green-black leaves made wet sounds under her feet, but didn’t soak her shoes.
“You have responsibilities at home,” her mother said, and Xan lifted his hands in exasperation and disbelief, like he was a half-sized copy of their father. Cara had seen the same gesture a thousand times.
“I already told Santiago I’d help him,” Xan said. “He’s expecting me.”
“Have you finished all your chores?”
“Yes,” Xan said. Cara knew i
t wasn’t true. Her mother did too. That was what made the conversation so interesting.
“Fine,” she said. “But be home before dark.”
Xan nodded. More to himself, Cara thought, than to their mother. A little victory of persistence over truth. After services, Xan could go off and play with his friends instead of being home the way he was supposed to. Probably she should have been angry at how unfair it was that her brother got to bend the rules and she didn’t, but she liked it better when the house and the forest were hers. Maybe her parents did too. It wasn’t really such a bad outcome if everyone was tacitly happy with it.
Cara’s father walked a dozen meters ahead with Jan Poole, the agricultural specialist. Jan’s house was on the way to town, and the older man joined them for the walk in to church each week. Or anyway, he did now that they went in for services.
Before the soldiers came, Cara remembered church being a much more optional thing. There had been months when Sunday morning hadn’t meant anything more strenuous than sleeping in and making breakfast for all of them to eat in their pajamas. Cara still wasn’t sure why the arrival of the soldiers and their ships had changed that. It wasn’t as though the soldiers made people come. Most of the men and women who’d come down from the ships to live on the planet didn’t come to church, and those that did weren’t any different from the science teams. When she’d asked, her mother had made an argument about needing to be part of the community that hadn’t made any sense. It all came down to: this was the way they did things now. And so they did them. Cara didn’t like it but didn’t hate it either, and the walk could be nice enough. She already knew—the same way she knew she’d get her period or that she’d move into her own house—that someday she’d push back against the weekly routine. But someday wasn’t yet.
Services were held in the same space as school, only with the tables taken out and benches made from local wood analogs hauled into rows for people to sit on. Who gave the sermon varied week by week. Most times, it was someone from the original science teams, but a couple of times one of the soldiers’ ministers had taken a turn. It didn’t really matter to Cara. Apart from the timbre of their voices, the speeches all sounded pretty much the same. Mostly she let her mind wander and watched the backs of the heads of all the people in front of her. The people from town and the soldiers who’d come to the surface all sitting together but apart, like words in a sentence with the spaces between them.
It wasn’t the same for the kids. Xan and little Santiago Singh played together all the time. Maggie Crowther was widely rumored to have kissed Muhammed Serengay. It wasn’t that the kids didn’t recognize the division so much as that it didn’t matter to them. The more soldiers came down the well, the more normal it was to have them there. If that worried her parents, it was only because they were used to it being a different way. For Cara and Xan and all the others in their cohort, it had always been like this. It was their normal.
After the sermon, they trickled out into the street. Some families left immediately, but others stood around in little clumps, talking the way the adults did after church.
The results of the new xenobotany run looked promising and The soldiers are breaking ground on a new barracks and Daffyd Keller’s house needs repair again, and he’s thinking of taking the soldiers up on their offer of new accommodations in town. Speculation on the water-purification project and the weather cycles data and the platforms or stick moons or whatever people wanted to call them. And always the question—sometimes spoken, but often not—Have you heard anything from Earth? The answer to that was always no, but people asked anyway. Church was all about rituals. Standing with the sunlight pressing against her face trying not to be impatient was as much a part of the day as the sermon.
After what seemed like hours and hadn’t been more than half of one, Xan and Santiago ran off with a pack of the other children. Stephen DeCaamp finished his conversation with her parents and wandered off toward his own home. The church crowd scattered, and Cara got to follow her parents back to their house. The road was flat, but the prospect of going back to the pond, of seeing the dogs again, made it feel like she was walking downhill.