Ninety Percent of Everything.

Jonathan Lethem, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.

The pix on my desk said, "There's an avatar on the line for you, Liz. Ramsdel Wetherall, looking for an appointment."

Understand that I was as amazed by this as if it had said "Bela Lugosi" or "William the Conqueror." The idea that Ramsdel Wetherall would want to talk to me was that far-fetched. But my pix couldn't be wrong.

"Put him off. I'll take the meeting in eight . . . no, ten minutes." I needed time to see what I could learn about the reclusive mogul's latest hijinks.

Then I'd decide if I wanted to let him hijink me.

ProfitWeek called Wetherall's acquisition of seventy percent of the island nation of Grenada the machinations of an eccentric genius.

On Mother's Day, a panel of experts on NewsMelt debated Wetherall's new infodump about management by avatar. They gave it a mixed review.

A transcript from America, America hypothesized that the sixth richest man in the world had gone into hiding because he'd come down with an exotic disease, contracted from one or more of his myriad s.e.xual partners.

No, said Channel Lore, the s.h.i.tdogs had taken over his mind by infiltrating his avatars.

Hemisphere Confidential Report had pix of Wetherall indulging his hobby in the smart la.s.so compet.i.tion at the sixteenth annual Wyoming Tech Rodeo. He placed second.

And just last week Eye had interviewed several astonishingly attractive women in whom Wetherall avatars had expressed a romantic interest. His attorneys had asked them to sign pre-introduction agreements, which prohibited disclosure of any personal encounter with Wetherall, should they ever have one. None of them had. Or so they said.

The search had turned up about what I'd expected: too much speculation and not enough facts. And my appointment was in two minutes.

Although I'd never actually interacted with any of Wetherall's avatars, I'd seen them before. They gazed serenely from pixes across his financial empire. From time to time they gave interviews that were lighter than air. Personally, I found avatars slick and flat as trademarks; whenever I met with one I felt as if I were chatting up Betty Crocker or Bill Gates. But still, Ramsdel Wetherall. I took the call.

The avatar that filled the screen was roundish and unthreatening. It had short blond hair, slightly tanned smooth skin, and a not very distinct chin. It might have been the face of a man in his twenties-or a fifty-year-old who had never sweated a mortgage payment. "Professor Cobble?"

"Call me Liz," I said.

"I'm Ramsdel Wetherall." It smiled as if it'd been waiting all its life to meet me.

I wanted to say No, you're not!

It was what I liked least about avatars: they acted as if they were the people they represented. Ninety-five percent of the time they operated on their own: buying and selling, lying and telling secrets, flattering and insulting. A busy billionaire like Wetherall could seem to be in two, three, or eleven places at once. The catch was that from time to time the original checked in from afar, and acted and spoke through his digital agent. The real Wetherall might be looking at me through those vapid eyes.

Possible but not probable.

"How can I help you?" I said.

There were several seconds of silence. The avatar's smile got bigger and goofier, as if the sheer joy of seeing me had struck it dumb.

"Was there something?" I said.

"Would you mind stepping to the window?" it said. Mystified, I got up and surveyed the campus. A dozen students sunbathed on the quad. Two girls and a dog were playing catch with a frisbee. A college cop was reading a pix in the shade of the whale statue.

"Do you see the white Jolly Freeze van parked in front of Gould Hall?" said the avatar.

I looked. "Yes." It had no customers, it wasn't lit for business, and it was parked in a handicapped spot. There weren't supposed to be ice cream trucks on campus anyway.

"Can I interest you in a short ride?"

"Does it come with chocolate sprinkles?"

The avatar laughed uproariously. This worried me-it wasn't that funny a joke.

"Turn that smile down, would you?" I said. "It's getting warm in here. So what's this all about?"

The avatar sobered instantly. "Do you believe the s.h.i.tdogs are intelligent?"

I considered. "If you're asking if they're as smart as human beings, I'd have to say no. Their intelligence is very limited - in a range somewhere between a flounder and a football player."

"What about their vocalizations?"

"They bark. So does La.s.sie."

"Can I interest you in a short ride?"

"You might, but you haven't. Look, Mr. Wetherall, I've got a Curriculum Committee meeting in five minutes, and a graduate seminar on Primate s.e.xology in an hour and a half. I've got three thesis advisees backed up outside my door and no time to waste giving you a crash course in exobiology."

"I just bought ten square miles of salt flats near Stateline, Nevada," Wetherall said.

"I'll be right down."

As with Ramsdel Wetherall, there was too much speculation and too few facts concerning the s.h.i.tdogs.

To start, we did not know where they came from. Astronomers spotted the ship that brought the s.h.i.tdogs to us only eighteen hours before it went into orbit. It made just three revolutions of the earth before splitting into five vehicles which entered the atmosphere and made soft landings in barren salt flats: Chile's Atacama Desert, Australia southeast of Lake Disappointment, the Tsagan Nor basin of the Gobi Desert, the Danakil Plain in Ethiopia. And Stateline, Nevada.

What followed was well doc.u.mented at all five landing sites. In the United States, fighters from Edwards Air Force Base scrambled and followed the mushroom-shaped lander to touchdown. The Marines arrived shortly after and cordoned off the area. It was fifty-three minutes before the head of the first s.h.i.tdog poked out of the lander. The Marines a.s.sumed that it was coming through some kind of hatch. It wasn't until all five s.h.i.tdogs had emerged from different exits that the onlookers understood.

The s.h.i.tdogs were eating their s.p.a.ceship.

On my way out I ran into Saintjohn Matthewson, the chair of the department.

"Oh, Liz, I'm glad I caught you before the meeting. I'm going to need that justification for the new curriculum by next Tuesday; the provost's breathing down my neck. And the corporate sponsors for the freshman chip implant program want to do some more pix of the experimental cla.s.sroom to include in their annual corporate report."

"But you said I had another month. Registration hasn't even turned in the enrollment figures."

"I have every confidence in you, Elizabeth. That's why I appointed you." He turned toward the conference room, then paused to admire his profile reflected in the window. "By the way, have you noticed the springs are broken on the sofa in the faculty lounge? Almost as if someone's been jumping up and down on it. Have the Building Committee order a new one, and keep the cost down."

"But Saintjohn-"

"Oh, and could you be an angel and get the coffee going before we sit down? I'm afraid this is going to be a long session."

He cruised ahead of me into the room. I stood outside the door for a moment and took a deep breath. Then I turned and went down the stairs and out onto the quad.

The pix of Judy Jolly Freeze on the side of the van waved and chuckled at me. "Please step to the rear door, Liz."

As I walked round to the back, pixes of Charley Cone and Billy Bar called out to me in childish voices, "Buy me! Buy me!" The heavy rear door swung open and I peered into the van. It was dim and cold-not freezing, but chilly enough to make me wish I'd brought a sweater.

"Come in, come in."

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw another Wetherall avatar sitting behind a dark wooden desk. A hologram. Unlike the first avatar, this one was wearing data spex. I saw its breath in the cold air-very lifelike. I was impressed. It mumbled something I couldn't quite hear.

"I'm sorry," I said. "What was that?"

Yellow and blue lights ghosted across the lenses of its spex. The avatar frowned. "The P/E is eleven," it said. "I'm not offering a ruble more than twenty-six."

I wondered if Saintjohn was worried yet. Good old Liz was never late for a meeting. "Maybe I'd better come back later."

"Absolutely not. Under no circ.u.mstances." It made a swiping motion across the desktop; I doubted it heard me. "I'm not interested in a limited partnership."

If I was looking to get ignored, I could do it as easily in the department as here. "Nice place you've got here," I said. "All you need is a few penguins."

"You're cold?" Its head jerked in surprise. "I find that the body works at peak efficiency when the air temperature is-e il prezzo migliore che mi puo fare, Giacomo? Liz, I'm sorry, you should sit down."

I settled reluctantly into the plush chair facing the desk. It was as warm as a baby's hand.

"Yes, Murk, I'll get her to sign a release, don't worry. Yes, I agree." It nodded, then its voice dropped a register. "I'm sorry, darling, I'm spread a little thin at the moment. How about eleven? I'll send the limo."

"And all I get is the Jolly Freeze van?" I stood. "Good-bye, Mr. Wetherall. We'll have to not talk again real soon."

The avatar shot out of its chair. "Liz, please." It pulled off the spex and dropped them on the desk. "I'm finished. I promise there will be no further interruptions."

Something about the way the spex bounced against the wood caught my attention. I leaned forward and flicked my forefinger against them. They were real. "You're you, aren't you? Ramsdel Wetherall."

He shrugged. "So they tell me."

I sank back in my chair and chuckled in disbelief. "Aren't you going to make me sign something?"

"That's Murk's obsession-my lawyer." He resumed his seat and did something behind his desk that brought the lights up in the van. For a moment he studied me, as if noticing for the first time that I was a woman. "Should I?"

I may not be Dawn Zoftiggle, but I have my pride. People tell me I'm attractive-smart people, lots of people. On the other hand, I didn't want to give him the impression that I was harboring some romantic design on him. He was Ramsdel Wetherall, after all. "You can't buy the s.h.i.tdogs," I said, feeling my face flush in the cold air.

"I don't want them." He opened a desk drawer. "I want their jewels."

I couldn't help it; I laughed at him. He laughed with me.

"Ice cream?" he said.

He had a Strawbetty Billy Bar and I had a Chuncolate Charley Cone. The van pulled out of the parking lot and I could hear its synthesizer chirp the first four measures of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" over and over again.

"Wait a minute!" I said. "I've got responsibilities. Cla.s.ses. A meeting to sleep through."

"I love ice cream." Ramsdel Wetherall licked a Strawbetty smear from the corner of his mouth. "It's all I eat these days. Of course, it has to be properly fortified and nutritionally balanced, but that's why I bought Jolly Freeze in the first place. You've seen jewels up close, right? At the Stateline site?"

I made myself sit back in the chair. "Sure," I said. "I've even seen them die."

When the s.h.i.tdogs ate their ship, n.o.body tried to stop them. At that point it was a.s.sumed that they were intelligent. They must have perfectly good, if completely alien, reasons for eating their ship. And of course, there was also the problem of the big stink, which kept even the toughest Marine at a considerable distance.

With the landers gone, we had no clue as to the origin of the s.h.i.tdogs or the purpose for which they were sent to earth-other than the beasts themselves.

Most of my colleagues agreed that the s.h.i.tdogs were beasts; the stubborn few who contended that we hadn't yet recognized their intelligence because it was so different from our own were trapped in a circular argument.

As had been reported any number of times, the s.h.i.tdogs were not dogs nor were their castings s.h.i.t-strictly speaking. From direct observation we could see that they were quadrupeds, ranging in hue from powder blue to near indigo. We estimated they weighed almost 3000 kilograms. The largest was fifteen meters in length; none were shorter than fourteen. They functioned without difficulty in earth's gravity. Their forelegs were long and particularly well suited to digging. Each of their three toes culminated in a razor-sharp crystalline claw, hard enough to scratch diamond. They used their short, powerful rear legs to propel them as they burrowed through salt flats and the piles of their castings. Their faces were composed of a circular maw which could dilate to as much as a meter and a half in diameter. Above that were two external organs the size of tennis b.a.l.l.s-eyes, we supposed. An orifice just above the rear legs could iris completely shut, or open to eject a continuous casting approximately twenty-five centimeters in diameter.

We'd been observing s.h.i.tdog behavior for six years. It consisted mostly of eating and excreting-or intake and output, depending on your model. There was no way to tell whether they were natural or created; it was entirely possible they were some kind of organic mechanisms. In any event, they tunneled through the salt flats, gorging on a variety of materials, pushing others aside. When they emerged, usually after a period of eight to ten days, their bodies were grotesquely distended. They lay pulsing and inert in the fierce desert sun, digesting-or processing-for as long as a month. During this time, they periodically vented small amounts of chlorine gas. At the end of this rest cycle, they would crawl to the casting deposit area, climb or tunnel to an appropriate spot, and release their casting in such a way that it coiled into the conical pile.

The odor of a fresh s.h.i.tdog casting was legendary. The Marines said it was like having barbed wired shoved up your nose. It smelled nothing like the excrement of any animal on earth; rather it was biting and bleachy, with just a hint of burning brakes. The castings were composed of long chain polymers, which, when first expelled, were one of the most adhesive substances ever known. The castings cured to a rubbery consistency in about a week, after which time their stench was slightly ameliorated. Because the s.h.i.tdogs returned again and again to the same area to excrete, some suggested that their behavior was purposeful and that their piles were in fact 'buildings', constructed in much the same way the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. I found this theory to be unsupported by the evidence. They had built two roughly conical piles at the Stateline site in the last six years. Each was approximately thirty meters tall; they were now at work on a third. There were similar piles at the other sites.

Public interest in the s.h.i.tdogs peaked when the first 'finished' pile of castings sprouted a two meter tall crystalline growth at its peak-the so-called jewels. Outwardly this formation resembled quartz in that it crystallized in the trigonal trapezohedral cla.s.s of the rhombohedral subsystem of hexagonal symmetry. In their brilliancy, prismatic fire and color variation, the jewels were nothing like quartz. After long and rancorous debate, a team of scientists tried to retrieve the jewels from the first Ethiopian pile, using lasers manipulated from a helicopter platform. However, as soon as the jewels were taken from the pile, they dissolved into a slurry of s.h.i.tdog casting. Subsequent attempts, including one in Nevada in which I myself partic.i.p.ated, met with similar results. The jewels appeared to be artifacts of the internal chemistry of a finished pile. When you cut them off, they melted, and the pile began to regenerate a new formation. No one knew why.

We in the s.h.i.tdog studies community suffered from severe fact deprivation. No s.h.i.tdog had ever died, and to destroy one for the purposes of dissection was unthinkable. Besides, no one had devised a way to catch a s.h.i.tdog, much less kill one. Attempts had been made to herd them offsite to field laboratories but, when confronted with manmade obstacles, they emited a string of their famous barks and retreated. The Chileans captured one once, using a flying crane and a specially constructed claw-shaped cage. They lowered the cage onto a s.h.i.tdog which was in a digestive stupor and the claw swung shut. This roused the beast and it began to bark piteously and hurl itself against the cage with a vigor not previously observed in any of its kind. Its actions were so violent that the helicopter was unable to lift the cage off the ground safely. Ten minutes later the s.h.i.tdog had eaten its way to freedom.

Unfortunately, except for devotees of xenophobic mediants, a scattering of conspiracy-addled loons, and few scientists like myself, the world had lost interest in the s.h.i.tdogs. Funding dried up. And why not? Their behavior was inscrutable, their origin a mystery, their nature repellent and their treasure ephemeral.

So why was Ramsdel Wetherall buying salt flats near Stateline, Nevada?

"I take it you've seen the jewels in person?" I said.

"I've been to all five sites."

I whistled. "Even Gobi?"

"I spent an hour last month hovering over Gobi B, close enough to touch the cl.u.s.ter. It has a red. . ." He shut his eyes and his face softened with pleasure. I've seen men look that way after s.e.x or just before cutting into filet mignon and once in front of the Botticelli frescos at the Louvre, but never remembering a rhombohedron. "They're the most exquisite things I've ever seen," said Ramsdel Wetherall.

Well, at least he was right about that. Then I got suspicious. "Wait a minute. A whole hour? This doesn't have anything to do with Cosmic Lighthouse Keepers?"

He crumpled his ice cream wrapper and tossed it at the trash can on the other side of the van. It missed. "You don't believe that the jewels might be windows to other realities and the piles are their batteries?"

"Oh, it's windows and batteries now?" I said. "Last summer Thorp was claiming they were some kind of beacons. Look, a theory explains observations, Mr. Wetherall. Did you observe another reality?"