Mirabile by Janet Kagan Read Free Book Online

laughed. “Down, Chris! She’s not insulting your bread! You use brandyflour in it—and brandyflour has almost the identical nutrients in it that clogweed has.”
    “You mean I could use clogweed to make my bread?” The idea appealed to Chris. She sat down again and looked at Susan with full attention.
    “No, you can’t,” Susan said. “It’s got a lot of things in it humans can’t eat.”
    Leo said, “I’m not following again. Susan—?”
    “Simply, Noisy. Clogweed’s a major nuisance. Mostly it’s taken care of by sheer heavy labor.
    Around Torville, everybody goes down to the canals and the irrigation ditches once a month or so and pulls the clogweed out by hand. When I saw
    Monster would eat clogweed, I figured he’d be worth keeping—if we could, that is.”
    “Not bad,” said Ilanith. “I wondered why the intake valves had been so easy to clean lately.” She leaned over to look at Monster’s holo. “Two years old now, right?”
    “Four,” said Susan. “Only one wouldn’t have made much difference. Mama Jason, I did a gene-read every year on them.
    Those’re on the next pages. In case I missed something the first time.“
    I saw that. The whole EC was there too, along with more holos and her search for matches with ships’ records. There were no matches, so the thing was either a Dragon’s Tooth or an intermediate. Just this year, she’d started a careful check for secondary and tertiary helices.
    She saw how far I’d gotten in her records and said, apologetically, “There’s a secondary helix, but I didn’t have a clue where to look for a match in ships’ records, so I had to do it by brute force.”
    I handed her the sample I’d gotten from Monster little over a half hour ago.
    “Here, a fresh sample is always helpful.”
    She took it, then looked up at me wildly. “You mean me? You want me to keep working on it?”
    “You want me to work on my birthday present?” I might just as well have given her a present, the way she lit up.
    I yawned—it was that or laugh. “I’m going to bed. But nobody’s to go down to the loch until Page 19

    Susan’s done with her gene-read.”
    Elly frowned. “Annie? We’ve got to net tomorrow or Chris won’t have anything to cook.”
    So there was no escaping it after all. “Take a holiday, Elly. There’s something in the loch that isn’t Susan’s clogweed-eaters. Leo and I will do a little looking around tomorrow—armed.”
    “Oh, Mama Jason!” Susan looked distraught. “You don’t think Monster chained up to a real monster, do you?” Her eyes squinched up; she was close to tears.
    “Hey!” I pulled her into a hug. For a moment I didn’t know what else to say, then I remembered the first time Mike had gotten a nasty alternative instead of what he wanted. “I’ll tell you just what I’ve said to Mike: sometimes you have to risk the bad to get the good.”
    I pushed her a bit away to see if that had worked. Not really. “Listen, honey, do you know how Mike and I planned to spend our winter vacation this year?”
    When she shook her head I knew I had her attention, no matter how distressed. I told her: “Cobbling together something that would eat clogweed. If all we have to do is stabilize your monsters, you’ve saved us years of work!”
    I pulled her to me for another hug. “Best birthday present I’ve had in years!”
    That, finally, brought a smile from her. It was a little wan, but it was there.
    “So here’s the game plan. You load the sample tonight while it’s fresh, then get a good night’s sleep and do the gene-read tomorrow while you’re fresh. Leo and I will do a little tracking as soon as it’s light enough. Everybody else gets to sleep late.”
    That did nothing to take the worry out of Elly’s or Chris’s eyes but I could see they’d both go along with it, though they were still concerned somebody might decide the kids should be evacuated. “Elly,” I said, “we’ll work something out, I