Fiddler Fair (anthology)

Last Rights

Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon

Larry and I are members of the North American Falconry Association and federally licensed raptor (bird of prey) rehabilitators. We have to be pragmatic and scientific—when you take care of predatory birds, they eat meat, and when you teach them to hunt so that they can be released, they have to learn how to make kills on their own. There is no shortcut for that process, and no way to “fake” making a kill. Needless to say, we Do Not Do Politically Correct, although we have not (yet) suffered harassment at the hands of people with Way Too Much Spare Time On Their Hands that some other rehabbers and fellow falconers have. Nevertheless, we’ve gotten very tired of seeing people who have never lived next to a field of cattle claim that cows are gentle, harmless, and intelligent—or try to raise their dogs on a vegetarian diet. So when Mike Resnick asked us for a story for Dinosaur Fantastic, we knew immediately what we were going to write for him.

Two men and a woman huddled in the wet bushes surrounding the GenTech Engineering facility in Los Lobos, California. Across the darkened expanse of expensive GenTech Grasite lay their goal; the GenTech Large Animal Development Project. It was “Grasite,” not “grass”; this first product of GenTech’s researches was a plant that was drought-resistant, seldom needed mowing, and remained green even when dry; perfect for Southern California. Sadly, it also attracted grasshoppers who seemed to be fooled by its verdant appearance; they would remain on a Grasite lawn, hordes of them, trying valiantly to extract nourishment from something the texture and consistency of Astroturf, all during the worst droughts. Anyone holding a garden party in Hollywood had better plan on scheduling CritterVac to come in and sweep the premises clean or his guests would find every step they took crunching into a dozen insects, lending the soiree all the elegance of the wrath of Moses.

But Grasite was not the target tonight; these three had no argument with gene-tailored plantlife. In fact, they strongly supported many of GenTech’s products—RealSkin, which reacted to allergens and irritants exactly the way human skin did, or Steak’N’Taters, a tuber with the consistency and taste of a cross between beef and baked potato. But all three of them were outraged by this assault upon helpless animals that GenTech was perpetrating in their new development lab—

Mary Lang, Howard Emory, and Ken Jacobs were self-styled “guerrillas” in defense of helpless beasties everywhere, charter members of Persons In Defense of Animo-beings; P.I.D.A. for short. There was nothing they would not do to secure the rights of exploited and abused animals. This year alone they, personally, had already chalked up the release of several hundred prisoner-rats from a lab in Lisle, Illinois. It was too bad about the mutated bubonic plague spreading through Chicago afterwards, but as Ken said, people had choices, the rats didn’t. Tonight, they were after bigger game.

DinoSaurians. Patent Pending.

Real, living, breathing dinosaurs—slated to become P.O.Z.s (Prisoners of Zoos) the world over. And all because some corporate MBA on the Board of the San Diego Zoo had seen the attendance numbers soar when the Dunn traveling animated dinosaur exhibit had been booked there for a month. He had put that together with the discovery that common chickens and other creatures could be regressed to their saurian ancestors—the pioneering work had already been done on the eohippus and aurochs—and had seen a goldmine waiting for both the zoos and GenTech.

“How could they do this to me?” Mary whined. “They had such a promising record! I was going to ask them for a corporate donation! And now—this—”

“Money,” Ken hissed. “They’re all money-grubbing bastards, who don’t care if they sell poor animals into a life of penal servitude. Just wait; next thing you’ll be seeing is DinoBurgers.”

Howard winced, and pulled the collar of his ­unbleached cotton jacket higher. “So, what have we got?” he asked. “What’s the plan?”

Ken consulted the layout of the facility and the outdoor pens. It had been ridiculously easy to get them; for all the furor over the DinoSaurians, there was remarkably little security on this facility. Only signs, hundreds of them, warning of “Dangerous Animals.” Ridiculous. As if members of P.I.D.A. would be taken in by such blatant nonsense! There was no such thing as a dangerous animal; only an animal forced to act outside of its peaceful nature. “There are only three dino-animopersons at the moment, and if we can release all three of them, it will represent such a huge loss to GenTech that I doubt they’ll ever want to create more. There’s a BrontoSaurian here—” He pointed at a tiny pen on the far northern corner of the map. “It’s inside a special pen with heavy-duty electric fences and alarms around it, so that will be your target, Howard. You’re the alarms expert.”

Howard looked over Ken’s shoulder, and winced again. “That pen isn’t even big enough for a horse to move around in!” he exclaimed. “This is inhuman! It’s veal calves all over again!”

Ken tilted the map towards Mary. “There’s something here called a ‘Dinonychus’ that’s supposed to be going to the San Diego Zoo. It looks like they’ve put it in some kind of a bare corral. You worked with turning loose the rodeo horses and bulls last year, so you take this one, Mary.”

Mary Lang nodded, and tried not to show her relief. The corral didn’t look too difficult to get into, and from the plans, all she’d have to do would be to open the corral gate and the animal would run for freedom. “Very active” was the note photocopied along with the map. That was fine; the rodeo horses hadn’t wanted to leave their pens, and it had taken forever to get them to move. And she’d gotten horsecrap all over her expensive synthetic suede pants.

“That leaves the Tricerotops in the big pasture to me.” Ken folded the map once they had all memorized the way in. “Meet you here in an hour. Those poor exploited victims of corporate humanocentrism are already halfway to freedom. We’ll show the corporate fat cats that they can’t live off the misery of tortured, helpless animals!”

Howard had never seen so many alarms and electric shock devices in his life. He thought at first that they were meant to keep people out—but all the detectors pointed inward, not outward, so they had all been intended to keep this pathetic BrontoSaurian trapped inside his little box.

Howard’s blood pressure rose by at least ten points when he saw the victim; they were keeping it inside a bare concrete pen, with no educational toys, nothing to look at, no variation in its environment at all. It looked like the way they used to pen “killer” elephants in the bad old days; the only difference was that this BrontoSaurian wasn’t chained by one ankle. There was barely enough room for the creature to turn around; no room at all for it to lie down. There was nothing else in the pen but a huge pile of green vegetation at one end and an equally large pile of droppings at the other.

Good God, he thought, appalled, Don’t they even clean the cage?

As he watched, the BrontoSaurian dropped its tiny head, curved its long, flexible neck, and helped ­itself to a mouthful of greenery. As the head rose, jaws chewing placidly, another barrel of droppings added itself to the pile