Irontown Blues

Six

It’s probably impossible to draw a logical connection between being Chief of the New Dresden Police and running a dino ranch. But that’s Mom for you. She seldom does what you might expect her to.

She was always busy, as police chief, keeping the citizens of New Dresden safe in their burrows. And she was good at it, I’ll give her that. She was the one responsible for defusing the only nuclear bomb to ever threaten her city. She did not have much of a life outside the police department and, oh yeah, raising me when she had time for it, between frequent sixteen-hour workdays.

Everyone was surprised that, when she retired from her job with a pension that meant she would never have to work again, she really never worked again. Never set foot in a police station. She retired to her little empty cylinder deep under Mare Imbrium, where I grew up. It was fairly distant from the city. She was devoted to breeding extinct reptiles.

That was the plus side of growing up with a mother who was usually too distracted by her job to be around to give affection and encouragement to her single human puppy. I always had plenty of pets to play with. Usually had a few bite marks on me from the more rambunctious of my carnivorous playmates.

To get to the Rockin’ New-Moan-Ya Ranch you had to take the express tube to Pythagoras, then double back almost a hundred miles on a local. The ranch is an unscheduled stop, so don’t forget to inform the driver or you’ll shoot right past it.

You get out in a small station that contains not much but a freight port for large shipments. Then you ride it down several miles until the door opens, and you get a faceful of the distinct odor of dinosaur shit.

Mom’s cylinder is not huge, nothing like a disneyland or a pocket environment. It’s about a thousand feet in diameter and two hundred feet high. You needed that much room for Tiny.

Tiny is possibly the largest animal in Luna. She may be the largest animal that ever lived, on Earth or Luna that is, though there is no way to be sure. The biotechs who first reverse-engineered her genome were surprised at the longevity of some dinosaur species. Tiny is fat and happy at a hundred and forty-six Earth years old, over one hundred and sixty feet of spotted Argentinosaurus huinculensis, the Great Antarctic Titanosaur. Her neck alone is almost eighty feet. She is forty-five feet tall at the shoulder. She eats every waking minute. She has to, to maintain her sheer bulk. She doesn’t seem to mind.

Mom inherited her when she bought the breeding ranch. She didn’t want her, but there was no choice. Tiny had long ago grown too big to be moved in any reasonable way.

Tiny is always on the alert for visitors, who arrive on a wide ledge at a point about a hundred feet up the cylinder. This is not a bad stretch for Tiny’s immense neck. She has never shown aggression, even to strangers, and with those she knows, she trumpets loudly and stomps over from wherever she had been cropping and — I sometimes think — contemplating truth, beauty, and infinity. Well, you can’t prove she isn’t.

Tiny did that now as soon as she spotted me, galumphing along with her head held high. She laid her head on the ledge beside me. That head was about the size of a two-person rover, which sounds big, but is ridiculously small for an animal that enormous. She nudged me with her cheek, and I had to catch my balance.

There was a bin against the back wall, with a lid that showed a lot of teeth marks where Tiny had tried to pry it open. I went to it, and her head followed along behind me. I pulled the cover open and took out… well, what would you feed a dinosaur? Tiny likes several things in addition to her daily diet of ferns, seaweed, and other greens. She will take pineapples or watermelons, but her favorite is coconuts. I grabbed an armload.

“Open wide, Tiny.”

She did, and I lobbed two in at once. She cracked them like I might have cracked a sesame seed. I guess she likes the taste, though she would have to eat them by the bucketload if that was all she had. But I guess you could say the same for elephants and peanuts.

When I was younger I was forced to operate the small bulldozer we used to shove her poop into the composting bin. Now that task is accomplished by a robodozer, as, of course, it could have been all along. That was Mom for you, using a very direct lesson to prove to me that I should get a good education. Otherwise, you could be doing something like this for a long time…

I didn’t take any more convincing.

I went through the air lock to the other part of the cylinder, the smaller part where the breeding animals are kept. This lock was for more than emergency backup in case of a blowout. There were flying creatures in this part of the habitat, and if one of them got loose, it was much easier to recapture it in this part of the cylinder than in Tiny’s world.

Mom used to breed land dinos like miniature stegosauruses and triceratops, no bigger than poodles or even Chihuahuas. Now it was all flying reptiles.

Pterosaurs came in all sizes, from the gigantic Quetzalcoatlus — probably the largest animal that ever flew, with its thirty-foot wingspan — to the Tapejaridae family, which includes Nemicolopterus, the smallest pterosaur ever, about the size of a finch.

And unless you are a breeder or collector, you probably don’t know those species names. Nemi-etcetera is better known as a flit in your neighborhood pet store. I don’t know why. Others are known as scalykeets, though they are not scaly, or repticopters.

I had to pass through the aviary to get to the lab, where I figured I would find my mother. Cages of various sizes held single specimens or flocks of the smallest flits.

There’s always something going on in the aviary. Pterosaur squawks and hisses don’t sound much like birdsongs, and frankly, several hundred of them all crying out at once sets my teeth on edge. I used to wear earplugs.

This is the business Mom had wanted me to go into. She was strongly opposed to my following in her footsteps, becoming a bobby or a cop, or — who knows? — maybe chief of police, like her. I told her I had handled enough dinosaur turds to last me a lifetime and soon I had my own beat.

It would have been a lot better if I had stuck with prehistoric-reptile ranching, but who knew? The Glitch was something no one saw coming, least of all yours truly.

I found Mom in the hatchery. It’s dark in there. It’s warm, too, maintained at a constant thirty-eight degrees, which seems to be the temperature the eggs like best.

Mom was examining a rack she had just pulled from one of the incubators. Ptero eggs vary in size from baseballs to not much bigger than a jelly bean. Most of them are leathery before they are opened, though a few are hard calcium, depending on the diet of the species.

The embryos in the rack she was examining were tupandactylus, one of the largest species she bred. A full-grown tupan has a wingspread of around five meters, and stands as tall as an average human when on the ground. They were called “sailboat” pteros, because they had the largest crests relative to their size of any of them. The crest of a mature sailboat could be three meters high and two meters wide, as large as the rest of its body excluding the wings. And the crests could be colored in an array of oranges and reds, sort of like the wings of an outrageous monarch butterfly. Add in the huge red beak that seemed to be adapted for cracking nuts, and you had a perfect ornament to any rich citizen’s menagerie. I don’t think there are more than a few dozen of them in Luna.

I leaned over and kissed the top of Mom’s head.

“Hold on a minute, Chris,” she said. She had never glanced at me as I entered, but she always knows when it’s me.

People meeting my mother for the first time are often surprised by how tiny she is. Even standing on her tiptoes, she can’t quite make it to five feet. So this is the legendary Anna-Louise Bach?

You bet. And I’d advise you not to mess with her. She has studied just about every martial art there is for a hundred years and could take you apart without breaking a sweat. If she had to, she could kill you with just her fingernails. It is hard to believe that such a tiny person could have gestated and delivered a big lug like me, but she did.

I looked over her shoulder at the egg rack. There were a hundred developing embryos, each in its egg-shaped depression and covered with a clear plastic layer. They were at the stage of their development where it was half critter and half yolk. They still weren’t moving around much, but every once in a while you could see a twitch. The wings had just started forming. The heads already had long beaks, which they would normally have used to cut through the leathery shell. The eyes were huge.

“Pick the worst one,” Mom said. I slowly ran my eyes over the sleeping nightmares.

“Six down and four from the left,” I said. Mom reached for a forceps and plucked the little creature out of its incubator and tossed it into a bin on the floor.

“Not the worst one, but definitely not show quality.”

That was as high praise as Mom would usually give out.

“This one is the most promising,” she said, pointing to a baby that looked completely identical to all the others.

“Good to see you again,” she said, grudgingly. “You don’t come around often enough.” There was a pregnant pause. “So how are you feeling, Christopher?”

That translates as “are you about to have another breakdown, or are you just your normal, fucked-up self?” She no longer bothered to comment on my trench coat, gray fedora, and black leatheroid shoes, all of which were not often seen outside of my habitat. If I needed to dress up to keep my tenuous grip on sanity, that was all right with her.

“Okay, and I’ll try to get here more often.” It was a lie, and I’m sure she knew it, but she accepted it. She stood on tiptoes, and I leaned over for her to plant a motherly kiss on my cheek.

Mom’s living quarters are at the far end of the ranch property, so I had to follow her through the rooms where hatchlings were grown to full-size, ready-to-ship juveniles. The pathway was lined with cages containing all the species Mom breeds. Some of them were very large, up to thirty-foot cubes, and some were more suited for a single canary.

We came to the door to her domicile. She let the door warden scan her eyes. The lock clicked open, and we went through, then through the second door and into her parlor. It’s a comfortable place of no particular style, pieces assembled haphazardly as she found the need for something. She went to the bar in the corner and fetched some glasses.

“Where’s Sherlock?” she asked. Sometimes I think she likes my damn dog more than she likes me. I can’t blame her, actually. Sherlock is more likeable.

“I left him to run in the Free Park. I’ll bring him next time.”

“Do that.” She crossed the room and handed me a tumbler with a single ice cube and some homemade vodka, strong enough to raise the dead. It’s all she ever has. I took a careful sip, she took a gulp, and we settled in overstuffed chairs by the fireplace.

“So what’s on your mind?”

“Irontown.”

She actually flinched. You didn’t see that often with Chief Anna-Louise Bach, but Irontown and the Big Glitch were an awful memory to her, a reproach to everything she stood for.