"We're not here to discuss Reilly, we're talking about your contract, and your herd.  And your herd is not a happy herd, I've heard nothing but grievances from them.  I simply can't allow one more murder than . . ."  He glanced at David, who shook his head barely enough to disturb a single amber wave of grain.  "Eighty," pronghorn-head concluded.

Callie seethed silently for a while.  There was no hope of talking to her just yet, not until the unionists repaired for consultations with their clients, so I moved back from the fire a little.  Something about the bargaining process had struck me as relevant to my situation.

"CC," I whispered.  "Are you there?"

"Where else would I be?" the CC murmured softly in my ear.  "And you only need to sub-vocalize; I'll pick up your words easily enough."

"How would I know where you'd be?  When I called for you after you rowed away from me, you didn't answer.  I thought you might be sulking."

"I didn't think it would be profitable for either of us to discuss what I'd just told you until you'd had time to think it over."

"I have, and I've got a few questions."

"I'll do my best to answer them."

"These union reps.  Are they really speaking for the dinosaurs?"

There was a medium-sized pause.  I guess the question did seem irrelevant to the issue at hand.  But the CC withheld comment on that.

"You grew up on this ranch.  I'd have thought you would know the answer to that question."

"No, that's just it.  I've never really thought about it.  You know Callie's feelings about animal rights.  She told me the Earthists were nothing but a bunch of mystics who had enough political clout to get their crazy ideas put into law.  She said she had never believed they actually communed with the animals.  I believed her, and I haven't thought about it for seventy, eighty years.  But after what I've just been through, I wonder if she's right."

"She's mostly wrong," the CC said.  "That animals feel things is easily demonstrable, even down at the level of protozoans.  That they have what you would recognize as thoughts is more debatable.  But since I am a party to these negotiations-an indispensable party, I might add-I can tell you that, yes, these creatures are capable of expressing desires and responding to propositions, so long as they are expressed in terms they understand."

"How?"

"Well . . . the contract that will eventually be hammered out here is entirely a human instrument.  These beasts will never be aware of its existence.  Since their 'language' is confined to a few dozen trumpeted calls, it is quite beyond their capacity.  But the provisions of the contract will be arrived at by a give-and-take process not unlike human collective bargaining.  Callie has injected all her stock with a solution of water and some trillions of self-replicating nano-engineered biotropic mechanisms that-"

"Nanobots."

"Yes, that's the popular term."