Strange Dogs recap

On a newly settled colony world with alien ruins and machines still running in the countryside, a girl named Cara looks after her small brother Xan and treats the local wildlife as her private responsibility. When a creature she has been feeding is killed, she carries it to the machines the settlement's children call dogs, and they repair it and send it back changed, no longer able to live among its own kind. Then a fleet arrives to claim the planet, the colony is absorbed into a military project it has no say in, and Xan is killed in the disruption. Cara takes her brother to the dogs. They repair him too: he comes back recognizably himself and no longer alive in any way that can be measured, and their parents cannot look at him. Rather than let him be taken, studied or explained, Cara leaves with him, and the two children disappear into the countryside with the machines, changed and beyond recall.

This novella sits in the long gap between the sixth and seventh novels and follows nobody from the main crew. What a listener needs: the ring gates have opened onto more than a thousand habitable worlds, and people have gone through them to settle. Every one of those worlds was built or altered by a civilization that died long ago, and the machinery it left behind is still running in ways nobody understands, sometimes harmlessly and sometimes not. This story takes place on one such planet, among the first generation of colonists and the children they brought with them, and it needs no other background. It does introduce the world and the events that the later novels build on, so a listener working through the series in order will find it sits naturally after the sixth book.

Cara lives with her parents and her small brother Xan in one of the first settlements on a colony world whose native biology behaves in ways nobody has catalogued. She spends her days outdoors, keeps track of a nest of local creatures she has been quietly feeding, and knows the country better than the adults. Among the things running loose out there are alien machines the children call dogs, which wander the landscape ignoring people and repairing whatever they decide is broken. When the creature Cara has been caring for is killed, she takes it to the dogs. They fix it and return it, and it is not right: it comes back alive but altered, and its own kind will not have it. Cara keeps what she has learned to herself.

A fleet arrives to take possession of the planet. The colony, which has been running itself, is absorbed into a military project that nobody consults it about, the countryside fills with equipment and construction, and the rules Cara's family lives under change without discussion. In the middle of that disruption Xan is killed in an accident. Cara knows exactly one thing that can be done about it, and she does it: she carries her brother's body out to the dogs.

The dogs repair Xan. He comes back as himself in every way Cara can test and as nothing a doctor would call alive: he does not breathe, does not eat, and does not injure or heal the way a body does. Their parents cannot accept him, and the planet's new authorities treat him as a specimen and a security problem rather than a child. Cara chooses her brother over her family and over any future in the settlement. The two of them go out into the countryside with the dogs, past the reach of the people who would take Xan apart to learn how he works, and Cara does not intend to stay unchanged herself. The colony is left with a mystery it cannot explain, and the world's new owners are left with the knowledge that the machines here will rebuild a dead human being.

Xan is killed in an accident during the military build-up around the settlement. Cara carries his body out to the dogs, and they repair him. What comes back is her brother in every way she can test and not a living boy in any way a doctor could recognize: he does not need to breathe, does not need to eat, and does not heal or fail the way people do. Their parents cannot accept him, and the new authorities on the planet regard him as a specimen and a security problem rather than a child. Cara chooses her brother. The two of them leave the settlement and their family for good and go out into the countryside with the dogs, beyond the reach of anyone who would take Xan apart to find out how he works, and Cara does not intend to remain what she is either. Nobody in the settlement understands what happened, and the world's new owners now know that the alien machines here will rebuild a dead human being. The novella ends there, on a planet that has just become the property of a fleet with no intention of leaving.