Caretaker by L. A. Graf Page A

in pursuit of nothing particular that he could see. He watched it tumble to a stop a dozen meters beyond him, grinning stupidly at him through a face full of hair as it dropped a leather ball so wet and sloppy that it didn’t even bounce. Paris could almost smell the pungent carnivore aroma of its breath all the way from here.
    Why bother? he wondered as he looked at all the details incorporated into the shady animal’s movements, smells, and sounds. Even the individual hairs inside its ears stirred as though feathered by a holographically suggested breeze. Alien holographic equipment must be delimited just like the human-built kind—held back by the sheer volume of data required to construct even the simplest simulation. Why bother expending the memory and processing capability needed to generate such fine detail in a noncommunicative element that could just as easily have been left out of the simulation altogether with no one being the wiser?
    The dog popped a single excited bark, then snatched up its ball and bolted off again. Paris shook his head after it. The whole point of calling them aliens, he reminded himself, is so we don’t keep trying to understand and judge them by strictly human standards. If that wasn’t true of aliens from the opposite end of the Milky Way, then who else could it apply to? He pulled his tricorder off his belt and hurried after Kim as the younger man rounded the corner of the house just ahead of him.
    Kim wasn’t the only one waiting for Paris on the other side.
    “The root cellar’s right over there,” the girl volunteered with a smile. She pointed toward what looked like a slanted box made of two wooden doors on the ground a few meters away.
    Kim immediately aimed his tricorder in the direction she indicated.
    “What’s down there?” It occurred to Paris that Kim’s naivete was amazing.
    “Potatoes … onions …” The girl linked her arm through Paris’s and snuggled close to tip her head against his shoulder.
    “But it’s real private …”
    I’ll just bet it is. After all, it could be anything the hologram programmer decided it would be. The girl smiled up at him, real as life, and Paris had to admit that the spurt of hormones leaping through his system in response to her attentions felt equally heady and real.
    Kim sighed and turned a shoulder to them both. “Paris, she’s only a hologram.”
    He shrugged, ignoring the blush he felt creeping into his cheeks.
    “No reason to be rude.” It was hard not to return a smile so sunny.
    Considering how much detail the aliens had invested in something as trivial to the scenario as a dog, Paris couldn’t help wondering if they’d been just as meticulous with every aspect of their creations.
    Kim’s little bark of surprise distracted Paris from his musings.
    He pulled his attention away with a certain effort. “What?”
    “Sporocystian life signs …” Kim thumbed through a series of readings on his tricorder, sweeping the area until he finally slowed to point at the sagging barn near the back of the property. “What’s in the barn?” he asked the girl as he started forward.
    “Nothing.” She skipped after Kim with a bit more urgency than Paris had expected. “Just a big old pile of hay.” He felt her fingers tighten on his arm, but whether to hurry him alongside her or to try to stop him from following, Paris couldn’t tell.
    “C’mon …” she cajoled. “Let’s go see the duck pond.”
    Why bother? The duck pond wouldn’t be any more real than the barn, or the dog, or the girl. Kim’s readings were probably the most tangible thing around at the moment. Suddenly, her touch and voice didn’t gift Paris with quite the same thrill. He disengaged his arm from her grip, and moved up alongside Kim to distract himself with the blips and flashes racing across the ensign’s tricorder screen.
    “There’s nothin’ in there,” the girl called from behind them.
    “It’s just a dark, smelly barn.”
    But a