Art Pact 163



Swirls of steam drifted lazily around the kitchen, idly traversing it as if the lords of that domain. They carried with them scents alternating between the delightful and the horrific, which Rushforth sampled with suspicious snorts - short sharp intakes of breath that made a whistling noise as he sucked in the air through his good left nostril and his ruined right one. He remained beneath the counter, letting the smells come to him, and as each one passed he pronounced judgement on them, either a pleased whimper when the scent was pleasant or a disapproving sneeze when it was not.

Rushforth's owner, visible to the dog only as a pair of fluffy slippers and a set of sheer-stockinged legs scribbled blue with varicose veins, bustled around the room in pursuit of her alchemical purpose. She sang nonsense songs to herself, by means of which Rushforth kept aware of her position at all times, even when she went behind the island in the middle of the room and disappeared from view. She seemed nervous - the dog would have said flustered, had he both the power of speech and the necessary emotional introspection to make such a fine distinction - but her voice only very rarely betrayed her, the gibberish lyrics maintaining an even and melodic tone even as she exerted herself pouring the contents of tin A into pot B and pot B into mixing bowl C and so forth. Only at one point in the last half hour had she ceased moving, when for a whole two minutes she had stood stock still in the centre of the open area between the counter and the island and shivered, muttering to herself and drumming the fingers of her right hand nervously against the flat blade of a spatula she had happened to be holding at that moment.

The dog himself, although mildly concerned about his owner's distraction, was focused on a much more personal and intractable problem. Somewhere in the room was the trail of the rat - or whatever it was. The cooking smells, pleasurable and noxious as they were in their turns, hid beneath them the more subtle clue for which he had been searching for the last couple of days. It seemed that every few breaths a tiny hint of the trail would reveal itself to his nose, but with his faculties diminished as a result of that ancient battle he was unable to follow the evidence as he would have been as a young pup. Not for the first time (and not, for a while at least, for the last) he thought back to the fight with sorrow and regret, and wished that he had known then what he knew now. Such thoughts inevitably led him further, and for a strange moment he experienced something that for his owner was quite routine, but which for Rushforth was an unusual - perhaps unique - sensation, the imagination of a in which he had solved the question of the rat (if that was what it was) and could act upon the information he had deduced.

The otherness of the experience made the old dog shudder - a long ripple of unease rolling at a leisurely pace down his backbone - and he lurched to his feet. His owner, who had been chopping something rhythmically on the near side of the island, paused at the sound behind her and turned to murmur something or other about food - either a warning not to interfere with her current project or an offer to decant some canned meat into Rushforth's bowl, he did not know which and for that moment did not care. He walked across the kitchen floor, claws clicking gently on the smooth flagstones, and made his way to the side of the fridge. He had been overcome with the strange notion that if he wished to find the rat (or whatever it was, and for the first time he also became aware that there were a lot of other things it might be that were not rats) he might be able to better triangulate its position if he were to move himself, and by observing the air currents in the room (currently visible in the patterns of steam), he might be able to trace the wafting scents back to their source.

At first it seemed hopelessly complicated, but after a few minutes in his new post by the fridge Rushforth began to make some progress in deciphering the motions of the air in the room. He understood that it was affected chaotically by his owner's motion back and forth - she acting as a spoon wielded by a particularly lazy cook to stir the air in random patterns, but that the shape of the room constrained the patterns of air when she was at rest, and that her motion caused only very short-lived perturbations. Most of the patterns were stable, and were to do with the heat coming from the front of the oven, the top of the stove, and the radiator just inside the door. He imagined lines of force in the air, lines populated with slow-moving convoys of scent, and traced out their position in the empty volume of the kitchen. If they were as stable now as they seemed to be, he reasoned, then the hints of smell that he was getting from the - he still thought of it as a rat, but he knew now that that was merely a placeholder in his mind, something his dog brain could hang onto to somehow understand the concept of a dangerous but solvable problem that he felt was the right attitude to take towards the unknown thing.

There it was - a small hole between the skirting-board by the door, and the cupboard unit in front of it. The cupboards were raised off the floor, so there was a run beneath them. The hole was too small for Rushforth to get in himself, but he slowly padded across the floor and stuck the good side of his nose inside, taking a strong whiff. Yes, the alien had been there.

Alien? Rushforth thought. How do I know about aliens?

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