—Wikipedia

The Barrens, New Utah, 3049

Laurel stopped. Rather, Agamemnon stopped, eyes bulging, a thousand purring cats roaring in his nose, shoulders quivering, hunched down on his hunkers ready to whirl, or bolt, or spring Pegasus-like straight up into the sky.

But Agamemnon did none of those things. He waited, trembling and snorting, anchored like lichen to a rock, because Laurel told him to. Not in words, but in body: a faint flinch of her shoulders, and he would have whirled fast as a wind devil; a faint rock of her seat, and he would have crossed the plain as a flaming chestnut rocket. Given an almost imperceptible scrunch-and-release of all her muscles at once, he would have imploded upward, coiled as a springbok, lashing backwards with steel-shod heels and screaming a battle roar.

But Laurel froze stock-still, not breathing, not blinking, paralyzed with shock. Because before her, spanning from rim to rim of what should have been the prickly scrubland of the Borrego Valley, stretched a shimmering haze of aquamarine. It rippled like a gentle sea. And, lurching upright, staring straight into Agamemnon’s white-rimmed eyes, was the most enormous mole she’d ever seen. A disfigured mole. A deformed mole. Not a cutesy, myopic mole in a children’s storybook, but a brute of a thing, with hands big as garden spades, tipped with claws strong as the tangs on a bucket loader, muscles thick as bridge cables locking its head to its arms.

For its part, the mole leaned forward, glared, and let loose a low-pitched chittering whirr, like the scolding of an angry wren. This proved too much for Agamemnon who, teetering among left, right, forward, and up, lurched backward in a valiant attempt to do what was demanded of him, while nevertheless exercising prudent equine judgment. At this, the giant mole paused, turned, trundled back to the field’s edge, and disappeared into the aquamarine sea of wire-grass. Laurel blinked, then rubbed sweat from her eyes. A gap remained where the stalks had parted, and an iridescent shimmer streaked toward the horizon, trilling like a hummingbird, answered by a buzzing wren-whirr from deep inside the reeds.

Laurel winced left, and Agamemnon whirled and blazed toward home.

Farmer John felt the danger well before he heard it, and heard it well before he saw it. Both “felt” and “heard” being misnomers for what he sensed, but the best translation possible for what was transmitted to his brain by two specialized sets of bones.

The first, dense as tusk and capped with a claw hard as dentine, articulated to the knobkerrie that passed for a wrist, and thence up his arm directly to his skull. With hands buried in earth, Farmer John Felt the regular plonk-plonk-plonk-plonk of Agamemnon’s hoof beats, far in the distance, reverberating through his skull like timbales on tympani.

The second, a cluster of tiny, moveable pitot tubes surrounded by a pliable sail of skin, concentrated whispers of air-propagating frequencies well above the range of human hearing. When standing erect, Farmer John could bend the sail at whim, absorbing sounds as faint as the squeak of grating sand or air turbulating past nose-hairs. So having Felt the ground tremble in his hands, Farmer John stood up, and Heard wind whistling far away in Agamemnon’s nose and Laurel’s ears, beyond his line of vision.

He then crouched low again, two fingers thrust into the ground, his ear bending the shape of the wind. His leathery face, incapable of expression, did not register his horror as a flame-red, six-limbed obscenity topped the small rise not ten paces before him, then lurched to a stop, quivering and whistling, but saying nothing that he could understand.

Farmer John had no Warriors. He had no Master within earshot. He had no idea what the far moon he was looking at. So he did what best he could. He stood bolt upright, leaned forward, and screamed “get the far moon off my land, you mooning pest of a herbivore!”

Of course, Farmer John did not really say “herbivore.” He said something probably better translated as: “you brainless, gluttonous progeny of vermin.” Further, he had no way of knowing for sure whether the thing was an herbivore, but if it wasn’t, he didn’t want it plonking through his fields, and if it was, he didn’t want it chomping through them, either.

In any event, it backed away. He kept his ear on it, but turned and trudged down to his concession, maintaining full height to connote his full authority. The two Runners at Post 10 shifted uneasily, their colors rippling in tune with the shimmering field behind them. “Hey Longshanks,” he barked. “Go tell Lord Sargon that we’ve got company.”

Actually, it took him a lot longer to say this, because he barked orders until the runners were out of earshot, and conveyed rather a lot more information than that, including the height, color(s), number of (apparent) limbs, eyes, nostrils, and other various protuberances demarcating his unwanted visitor; plus his best assessment of sentience (none) and numbers (one). Also, as the Runners sped toward the far horizon, he made them repeat back every line of the report, to ensure that they’d gotten the full message, and that correctly.

Then, immediate danger past, and duty done, he got back to soil testing. He had to figure out how best to cope with all those toxins.

Longshanks Watched Farmer John and his sweet field of blue-green manna. It was not their job or duty to Watch anything else. It was their Right and Duty (the two words better being combined into an indivisible whole that meant both things at once) to stand like gateposts, their iridescent hair rippling with the breeze, rendering them all but invisible. They Watched Farmer John closely, for Farmer John bore immense responsibility, including the (to them) paramount responsibility of feeding Longshanks.

Actually, their name was something more like: “Longshanks, Post 10, Concession John, Eanna House, Sargon Protectorate, Mesolimeris, Mannaworld.” As a pair, they’d Watched Farmer John faithfully their entire lives, inheriting their post from their parents, never falling into land debt, and never aspiring to any other Post. For his part, Farmer John might address all Longshanks as if interchangeable, but Longshanks 10 John had been Mentioned in Dispatches for their speed and accuracy, and Sargon himself had appointed them to that Watch.

There was no better posting. Runners in Farmer John’s employ always ate. They were never sent on spurious missions. They were never beaten or tortured. They were given clear orders and drilled to succeed. So when Farmer John bellowed “Hey, moonbrains, get moving!’ what happened at Post 10 ceased to be their responsibility, and from that moment, poised on tiptoe, they cared only for four orders: Speed. Direction. Recipient. Message. When they heard the code most dreaded by any Runner: All Due Haste, they did not pause to flinch. They lit out like silent typhoons, catching and repeating the remaining orders on the fly, burning every last reserve to maintain near-invisibility as they streaked toward the horizon.

Other Runners might have held something back, terrified of being left like gasping fish at the end of that most dreaded journey’s end, too depleted even to stand, used up in a final dash for an employer’s whim. But their great race anchored on one end by Farmer John’s meadows, and on the other by Sargon’s fealty, Longshanks sped toward the certain knowledge that, at day’s end, they would Eat. Along the way, they repeated and drilled one another on The Message, as insurance, should either fail The Mission.