The teenaged lemurian was well-known to the authorities. Johnny the Mutt, they called him. He was a mongrel, half lemurian, half human. As such, he had a few more liberties than full-blooded lemurians, and several policemen had been made aware of this, usually after they had picked him up and given him a hard time. He was the only lemurian in the town of Odessa allowed to walk around freely, and was allowed to communicate freely with citizens—as long as he kept it proper.

Johnny served the community as a ratcatcher, quite successfully; making a very decent living. All lemurians in Odessa depended on him, to various extents. He brought in money, and he ran errands for them in town, getting supplies and medicine when necessary.

The police had no trouble apprehending him. They didn’t need to go look for him, nor did they have to ride out to the settlement on the outskirts of town where the Mexicans and about a dozen lemurians lived in rickety shacks.

They simply ordered the services of the ratcatcher, and next morning he came to them.

They cuffed his hands behind his back. The officer that picked up his maple wood carrying case almost pulled his back, and had to use both hands to carry it off. Lemurians were smaller, but quite a bit stronger than the average human. Which wasn’t something most men liked to be reminded of, and the officers handled Johnny particularly rough after that, pulling him along and pushing him into the back of a police car.

When the nervous lemurian asked them what this was all about, they told him to shut up his dirty dogface.

Lemurians didn’t have any rights. They had no legal identity, no papers. They weren’t considered human, so laws didn’t apply to them.

Honestly, Johnny’s ancestors, sold into slavery, had had more rights than free lemurians did now. Their owners could do with them as they pleased, but at least the rest of the world recognized them as someone else’s property and would leave them be.

A fellow in a large shiny car had rolled down his window once, and told Johnny, “Hey, at least you don’t have to pay taxes!”

The police could treat him however they wished. He waited in the back of the police car for what seemed like hours, while the officers squabbled about who was to take Johnny away.

Johnny was worried about his carrying case. Besides wire cages, steel spring traps, bags of sawdust, oatmeal, a claw hammer and a flashlight, it contained two life ferrets. Even on jobs where he didn’t use the ferrets, he would still take them with him, just to make a point. Some customers seemed to think he would personally crawl beneath the floorboards to catch the rats, believing lemurians to be just one step removed from mindless beasts.

The officer that finally got into the car and behind the wheel, muttering to himself and giving Johnny a dirty look, had washed that morning with cheap carbolic soap, but the stink of his rancid bed in need of clean sheets still lingered on his skin.

Like all mammals the lemurians have a well-developed sense of smell. Mankind is the odd exception in this case.

Johnny could tell from the man’s sweat that he had been dominated by his stronger-willed colleagues and the task of driving the car had been imposed on him. Johnny knew this humiliation could easily turn into rage towards him, so he tried hard to sound deferential when he asked the officer, “Sir, where am I being taken, and, well, why?”

The man gave him a mean look in the rearview mirror and snapped at him, “You think you can put your dirty paws on human girls and get away with it, pup?!”

The girl! So that’s what this was all about! What had the girl told them? Now he really started to worry. What would they do to him if she had told the police she had really felt threatened by him? Take him out to the desert and shoot him like a rabid dog?

He had only wanted to talk to her. It was of course his nose that had led him to the girl. The wind had carried her smell, and a shiver had gone through him, from the top of his head to the tip of his tail. He couldn’t identify what was so unique about her odor. She smelled roughly the same as other teenage girls, sweetly sour and slightly buttery. All healthy young people smelled lovely, but humans had the strange habit of masking their natural smell with chemicals that reeked like a parody of flowers and fruit.

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His nose had followed the trail. He didn’t understand what it was, but it was absolutely intoxicating. He didn’t know what he was doing. He had lost all sense of time and space, there was nothing beyond that smell. He had gotten much to close, and was fighting the urge to put his nose into her blonde hair (he had seen blonde hair countless times on all sorts of people, but never before had it seemed magically spun of pure sunlight like this), when she had suddenly turned around.

The police car sped out of Odessa while the officer angrily ate sandwiches from a paper bag. After about two hours the man pulled over in the town of Sweetwater, and stepped out of the car. Had they reached their destination?

The officer returned with large bags of potato chips and cans of Dr. Pepper, which he ate and drank compulsively as they continued their journey, taking the highway towards Dallas.

They drove all the way to the state line, pulling up at a lone squat building with a few cars parked in front. The officer got out, grunting, slapping crumbs and flakes of potato chips off his uniform, and disappeared into the building for a long while.

The sun slowly turned the car into a furnace and Johnny was left alone with his thoughts.

He had been bewildered when he met the girl’s deep sea green eyes. She recoiled when she first saw him, and he had backed off, not saying a word, embarrassed at his creepy behavior.

He kept his distance, but he had followed her around, hoping to find out what it was about this girl that made his heart flutter so. He saw her meet up with a group of friends, and heard her loud messy laugh a couple of times, which came out at full-force at unexpected moments, sounding like someone dropping a handful of dishes. She moved like other girls her age did, like children not used to their suddenly full-grown bodies, awkward but endearing.

Johnny had never before felt attracted to humans, nor found them a particularly handsome species. They were lumbering, unnatural creatures, ashamed of their own bodies, and seemingly disgusted with their own bodily processes and biological origins.

Although Johnny was half human, he had never felt part of their world. When he was around humans, he had always felt so very much a lemurian. They didn’t register his human side, they only saw a weird-looking lemurian. He was part of a small lemurian community in the area, and all the lemurians treated him as one of their own. All, except maybe his own mother…

He had tried forgetting about the girl after the second day he had followed her and she had yelled at him to get lost.

Following people around wasn’t healthy behavior, of course. And now he had scared her. He had to stop.

He told himself: whatever it was he had felt, it surely wasn’t truelove. It simply couldn’t be. Who had ever heard of a half-breed finding truelove? It made no sense.

The fact that humans and lemurian could breed was a biological fluke, which some scientists called procreative atavism. The common ancestor of the homo sapiens and the lemur sapiens lived more than sixty million years ago. Their offspring was always infertile, much like mules, the offspring of horses and donkeys, species that split up a mere four million years ago.

Lemurian tradition taught that the present was shaped by the future. Lemurians believed that future generations showed them the way to live, quite the opposite of many human religions that looked to the ancestors for guidance.

When two lemurians found their truelove, the pull they felt was their future child guiding them. It was the will of the future child to be born. Since a half-breed was barren, there was no future child to guide anyone, therefore they would never find truelove.

Yet the half-breeds were far from alone in this. Since there were not very many lemurians left, and they were scattered to the four corners of the world, very few of them would ever find their truelove. They begat children anyway, even though, according to their creed, all these children were an abomination and had no place in the future. But without these children their species would soon be extinct.

Many lemurians now believed truelove had always been nothing but a myth.

Johnny, woozy from the sweltering heat, was pulled out of the car by the officer and handed over to an old plain-clothed cop, who looked at Johnny with heavy-lidded eyes, and gave him a tired, unshaven smile. He then re-cuffed Johnny’s hands from behind his back to the front, and told him to go and “relief yourself, kid” behind the building, because they were in for a long ride.

They drove a dusty green Buick. At least this man was more talkative, which might have been on account of the generous helping of brandy he had poured into his thermos of coffee. One didn’t need a lemurian nose to smell that.

“I was told to bring you to Iowa,” the man said.

“Iowa?” asked Johnny. Iowa? Why the hell was he going to Iowa?

“It’s for your own good, kid. Your kind have a lot more liberties up north. So we figure, if they like having you furry folk around, we’ll bring you to them!”

“But my family is in Texas, they are counting on me! I provide for them!” said Johnny in a panic.

“No use worrying about it now, kid. Write them a letter and tell them to come to Iowa. They’ll love it!”

“How are they supposed to do that? They’re not allowed on a train, or ride a car..!”

“Kid, you should have of that before you started pawing human girls.”

“I never touched that girl!”

“Kid, you’d better watch your manners, even in Iowa. You may have more rights there, but I’m sure they don’t include getting fresh with teenage girls!”

After a nine hour drive, he was led out of the car, uncuffed and pointed in the direction of the city of Des Moines. They had driven through the night, the day broke in the east, in the north a few light could be seen on the horizon. “North, kid, that’s the way to go, you hear?”

The first Iowans Johnny came across looked at him the way Texans had done his whole life. Lemurians may have had more rights here, but Johnny feared nobody had bothered telling common Iowans about that.