“What makes an asset? I don’t know, but the essence of numismatics means we don’t even need to know – not always. If someone else wants to buy the garbage bag I’d throw out of my house, then it’s not that its content stops being garbage… it’s that I start being educated.”
-Xiang Denise, Paper Metal Foreign Affairs Liaison
Thousands of years ago, Jeanine Chabot had been a little girl.
Her formative years contained some fairly unremarkable things for a child born into her sort of family in her sort of the world. Favorite cereal packaging, a small plastic playhouse in the yard, cartoons whose programming had been selected for both proper stimulus of a growing mind and entertainment draw. A game application that taught her how to run a small snack bar for elves and dragons and large-hatted men with larger facial hair. Dropping eaves on her mother talking with her aunt, late into the Saturday morning hours of darkness. Twice-a-month ice cream binges spent watching silly shows with the family.
Of her old youth’s memories, though, the one sitting at the forefront was Martin Leonard. Martin Leonard had been somewhere between fluffy golden dopey joy and the Labrador’s usual web-footed good temperament. He had been a Good Boy, like every dog since the wolf’s offshoot ancestor came to take a morsel from a human hand. Oh, he’d had a thing for selective listening if he thought he could run off for a bit to find excitement, especially if the excitement included patches of mud or tepid water to plow through… but that didn’t change the fact he’d been a Good Boy.
He’d also been almost the spitting image of these creatures huddling together, going around in what absolutely had to be an argument.
Yes, the creatures stood noble of footing and humble of back, hunched yet clearly two-footed. Yes, they carried weapons and other tools of survival. Yes, they had assessing looks in their eyes split between imaginative fear and experienced suspicion. Yes, there was no way the entities actually called humans their masters or even necessarily equals.
None of that changed the fact that these here were obviously and thoroughly reminiscent of Labrador retrievers.
“I can’t tell if my biggest impulse is to pet them or try talking with them via pictograph,” Jeanine’s brain declared in her Extremely Private Journal.
She wouldn’t have to worry about starvation with her remaining supplies, at least for a while. Supplementing her diet would be tricky, and (eventually) necessary. Even without, though, a drop to a thousand kilocalories a day would let her continue for quite some time at a marginal reduction of pace. These thoughts wasped around and itched as the… dogs? People?
Homo sapiens sirius, perhaps. SURELY she’d earned the right to bequeath a prototype name.
The canids’ not-immediately-consuming reaction bothered her a bit. Good stuff that she’d happily eat, gone in a diplomatic gesture. That first one of them, the one she’d call Brave for now, apparently liked chicken alfredo – he’d earned her goodwill for taking the plunge. The fact that he was talking with Quick and seemed to want to negotiate the ration packet’s return (despite his poor first reaction) reinforced that goodwill twofold. Quick’s apparent reservations about her colleague’s decision made Jeanine respect her caution.
It was hard to get a read on Strong, standing over there and watching in relative placidity.
Funny thing, though – Brave, Quick, and Strong had rocked her world with their existence. Dogs! Dogs with basic clothing and carrying tools in their wobbly feet-hands! Talking dogs, smaller than herself but plenty big enough to fall into the lower end of human scale, engaging in discourse and debate! Debate!
A long-ago course in logic and maths prodded her brain’s belly. It was the… something like “compressibility of ideas’ complexity” – the longer and more distinct syllables in a word, the more information that word could contain. “Bark” and “woof” and “grrrowowow” might equate to elementary English tidbits, but what she was witnessing had a cadence far unlike the posturing and handful of predictable rhythms one might see in a group of dogs meeting on the street. The same sounds, but ordered. She could swear she was beginning to recognize a phrase or term here and there, getting repeated in nasally bellowing tones.
The supposition might be wrong, and even if it weren’t she’d no earthly idea what exactly was being said, but she was as sure as she’d been of nearly anything that these dogs were arguing about her and her offering of food. Maybe their argument was running the same exact path as her own thoughts’ twistings, using different vocabulary.
She couldn’t quite exile the thought of getting speared and eaten by agitated dog people, but she couldn’t put flesh on it and look it in the face just yet either.
“Okay, okay. Okay. These Labrador retriever approximations are people. What are you going to do with this information, Jeanine?”
Her hands shook a bit, and she started turning in small circles. List out possible actions, order them. It was just like taking minutes for a fork-in-the-road meeting. Options, their likely consequences, their improbable consequences, gauging the merit of each.
“Item one: I could part ways with these people and pretend we never met. Positive results include decoupling myself and the enclave from them, and thus short circuiting any near-future problems the association might incur. Don’t know what the odds of association-caused problems would be, let’s assume ‘low’ in general and ‘moderate’ when accounting for avoiding their potentially hazardous designs like trying to eat or enslave me. Other positive effects… I can’t think of any.”
She looked up. The sky seemed like a warm hand.
“Negatives: numerous, but given that they might independently run into me again even if I left now, let’s say skedaddling would probably be a waste of time in some way or other.”
Not to mention the humdinger of an opportunity cost.
“Item two: I could try to attach myself to their party and encounter whatever wider culture they are part of. Don’t know why they might agree or decline, but if I were in their power they could decide anything from putting me in a nest like a baby bird to – AGAIN, a very major concern – eating me without the courtesy of killing me first.”
She let her diaphragm flutter as her eyes scratched at the world without leaving marks.
“The positives include… hmmm. I think I’ll have a clearer idea of what their lives are like and gain a stronger understanding of one of – if not the – most important people groups in history. Ninety five to ninety nine percent chance. Whatever; ‘I guarantee it’ odds.”
The dog people let their eyes scratch at her. It felt like they left some marks.
“Potential negatives are… basically everything imaginable, as far as the exigencies of misadventure are concerned. If I go with them, and I’m in their power, the law of large numbers says that my fortune’s pretty bleak. Might be as bad as breaking a toe. Might be as bad as breaking my neck. I’m going to split the difference and say I’ll snap an arm in two, even though none of this is how probability works. Let’s say ‘low’ for death and ‘high’ for serious inconvenience.”
Her brain was wandering, partly from shock and partly from fatigue. She felt thousands of years piling up, each one resting ill upon another so that keeping them balanced left her dizzy. A few hardy tears climbed her face’s geography.
“Item three: I bring this group with me, either back to the enclave or off on a real estate hunting expedition. They see what I’m hoping to do.”
She measured up the dog people who were measuring her.
“Trying to do this with normal dogs falls under the category of ‘bad idea’ and it only gets worse the longer I think about it. Positives are closely related to those of item two, only there’s exactly zero chance of a good outcome if I end up coercing or force-marching them, and the language barrier steals my ability to justify or explain myself. The upsides revolve around my communicating the enclave’s desires and vulnerabilities, the downsides are widespread and heavy, and the whole idea seems more like jumping off a cliff than jogging down a mountain.”
She dusted imaginary dirt from her forearms.
“The third door leads inside an iron maiden and the first door looks ominous and vaguely moldy. I guess it’s time to look at the second door.”
Jeanine Chabot, powerless to stop herself, stumped right up to the trio of dog people, saluted, fell back a little, and in the most monotone way imaginable she held a hand out to Brave before declaring, “Take me to your leader.”
“Uff!” replied Brave.
The dogs’ eyes patted her down. Strong had a hand paw near a wide spear as he gauged her outstretched palm. Brave’s neck hair stood up a bit in what could have been a threat display, maybe a courteous warning; his silence unsettled Jeanine far more than a snarl, though the zero count of discrete hostile actions slowly reassured her. She hoped she hadn’t missed any signs of toes getting trod upon or faces pelted with egg.
A distant back brain segment made note of Quick, and how she stood apart to better watch proceedings or possible meeting interruptions. Jeanine assessed the dog woman like this was an executive meeting, and the participants needed the word-perfect minutes afterward. Brave and Strong looked her up and down. Their pale yellow pelage lent them some amount of camouflage suitable for long grass fields. Fortunately, they didn’t seem inclined to use these powers of predation for attacking her.
“Nope, of course there’s no way we’re going to…”
She looked at Quick, who was still keeping her distance, and sighed. Brave and Strong both reacted. Whether it was a flinch or a baring of teeth or something else entirely, she didn’t know. Her attention contracted on a mental stick figure. This stick figure had the label “you” and repeatedly got hammered upside the head with a giant spiked hammer fit for use in the days of the Spanish Inquisition.
“I swear, it’s like life’s a stupidity contest these days, and they’ll need to invent a completely new metal for casting the medal I’m going to earn.”
She grabbed Terence.
She grabbed an oblong stone.
She held them out in each hand, clearly visible, until she was sure the whole gang’s attention was on her and her tokens.
She extended the stone at Brave, and held Terence close to her chest.
Finally, the stone and the telescope both hopped, one after the other, circling her, her own feet marching with gusto as she turned around in a large slow spin.
By the time the orbit was completed, she cautiously arrived in front of Brave. The stone-telescope display split up when she pushed the rock into Brave’s hand. Her very soul relaxed as he both accepted it with his fingers and allowed her to move his hand up and down without objection. Four seconds of the childish display went by, then she stood back, still holding Terrence. Her hands kept moving the telescope.
“You” and “me” and “follow” – how did one say words without words? Simply.
With such silly fateful half-mute grammars, contracts fit to found empires are written.