He nodded. “That was a long time ago. It’s there. Do you want it brought up?”
“I’ll need a place with good light to work in. The devices are solar powered.”
“Aside from the deck, the best light is in where the horse is. There’s room in there for you to set up a worktable, if you like. If the horse won’t mind.”
“The horse won’t mind,” she said. “In fact he may be very helpful.”
Blue was interested. “What are you going to do?” he asked when the men had set up her table and she was busy unpacking the little machines she would work with.
“I’m taking the first tiny step in attempting to let the wolves learn to talk.”
He snorted, asked, “How are you going to do that?”
“Same way they did with you. Or with your father or mother. They discovered or created an equine voice-box cell for horses. They took genetic snips from humans, the parts that give them the parts of the brain associated with language, the vocal cords and throat, and the tongue. Then they took centuries or so to figure out how to meld the two physiologies and how to insert the genetic instructions into the reproductive system of horses.”
“Centuries?”
“Well, each new horse baby took almost a year to be born, then it had to be exposed to language, which meant people around it all day talking. Then if it didn’t work—and the first few dozen times it didn’t work—the people doing it had to figure out why it didn’t work, then they had to start over. I say ‘they,’ but of course there was a different ‘they’ every thirty or forty years. There was no way to hurry the reproductive part. It takes patience.”
“I have noticed my tongue is not like most other horses’ tongues.”
“Yes, the tongue has to change some while still not interfering with your normal eating habits. It’s all very complicated. We’ve succeeded with horses and dogs—that’s how I know we’ll be able to do wolves. There are only minor differences in the genetics, but . . .”
“There was a talking coyote in Artemisia.”
“So Abasio said, yes. Dogs and coyotes can talk; wolves are next.”
“Who will teach them to talk when they’re very young? Their parents can’t.”
“Well, sometimes we’ve been able to change adults. If we can change the pack members, they’d teach the young ones. Otherwise it would be whoever’s around.”
“And when you have talking wolves, then what? Will that stop the waters rising?”
She stared at him for a long moment. “Blue, nothing we know of will stop the waters rising.”
“Then what good is it?”
She sat down on a hay bale and gazed at him thoughtfully. “If you had the choice to change what you were and go on living—let’s say you could turn into a whale—would you do it?”
“My other choice being what?”
“Drowning.”
“Oh, I’d whale-ize. Sure. At a full gallop. Are you proposing to do that to me? A whale seems a bit large.”
“No, we’re not proposing to do anything to you, because at the rate the waters are rising, you’ll live out your life on land, and so will the wolves. But you have offspring, colts.”
“Foals; colts are male, fillies are female. I have offspring, yes, here and there.”
“You’d like the idea that your descendants could . . . whale-ize, wouldn’t you? If it was that or drowning?”
“I’d like the idea, I think.”
“And you’d like them to talk? Can yours talk?”
“Some of them, but not all. Speaking doesn’t breed true. With some mares yes, with others, no.”
“Well, if they could, they could tell us what they prefer. Wouldn’t that be an advantage?”
“To a whale?”
“Isn’t it an advantage for a race of creatures to be able to tell us it wants to be saved instead of just having us do it? Isn’t it an advantage to any creature to have a voice, language, and hands to manipulate things?”
“You mean, considering what mankind has done with all three of those great gifts?” He whinnied laughter.
She flushed. “Too many of mankind are fools, but not all. The waters rising may be the salvation of mankind, in fact. So we believe.”
“And you’re going to arrange it so whales would have hands?”
“A voice, a language, and manipulators of some kind. Whales and dolphins already have their own languages, but no one else can speak it. The easiest way to solve that may be the way we’ve done it already: create simple translators. Anyhow, that’s why I’m trying to give the wolves a language. I like wolves. I admire wolves. And horses.”
“Horses do not admire wolves.”
“I know. I realize that herding herbivores cannot admire packs of carnivores. I’m hopeful that the time will come when no creature with a developed brain will ever kill any other creature with a developed brain. We have always had two aims. First: to save humanity and as many other dryland living species as we can. Second: to make every intelligent creature mentally and physically capable of language and capable of talking to every other intelligent creature.”
“All creatures are intelligent.”
She threw up her hands, crying, “I know. We know. It’s impossible to save them all, so we started with those that either have a language or that we can give a language.”
She turned away from him, her shoulders sagging, and he knew this was a grave trouble to her.
He said, “Well, fish aren’t very intelligent, and we’ll all have to eat something. If the world is underwater, that means either fish or seaweed, and I don’t think I’d do well on fish.”
She sighed, nodded, conceded. “We’ve been arguing over that for several generations. One group of us has been experimenting with vegetable body parts for humans, hoping we could live on sunlight, soil nutrients, and water . . .”
Blue turned his head to stare at her, his mouth half-open as he considered Abasio with branches. “What would that look like?”
“The volunteers looked like themselves with green wings added on. It worked, but the
