THE UNDOMESTICATED MAN
When the alien energy-creatures came to Earth
in 1970, mankind tried eyery weapon it knew against their attack, but they were
all useless—for how can you battle beings with
enormous power but no solidity? Within a few short years, all of Earth was
controlled by the Masters, who used men as their pets and playthings.
But
finally the day came when men had a chance
for freedom. During a period of unusual sunspot activity, a huge solar prominence erupted, and the energy
from that awesome explosion temporarily short-circuited the Masters. For a few
days, humanity was free to mount one last frantic attack on its overlords.
And, at the end, the fate of the entire
rebellion rested on one man. ...
Turn
this book over for second complete novel
"I
am His Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose
dog are you?"
—Alexander Pope
On the Collar of a Dog
6419
Under the Leash
•
Being a True and Faithful Account of the Great
Upheavals of 2037; with Portraits of Many of the Principals Involved;
as well as Reflections by the Author
on the Nature of Art, Revolution & Theology
•
by
THOMAS M. DISCH
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
MANKIND UNDER THE LEASH
Copyright
©, 1966, by Thomas L. Disch
An Ace Book. AH Rights Reserved.
Part
of this work is based on a novelette entitled White Fang Goes Dingo, from Worlds of If magazine,
copyright ©, 1965, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.
Cover by Kelly Freos.
To Kenny
& Liora in New York, and in Minnesota, to Grandma
Gilbehtson.
planet of exile
Copyright ©, 1966, by Ursula K. LeGuin
Printed in U.S.A.
CHAPTER I:
In which I am bom, and my father is done In by Dingoes.
M y
name is White Fang, though
of course that is not really my name. My name is really Dennis White, now. I
like the old name better; it is more in keeping with the image I have of
myself. But perhaps such an attitude is just a hangover from the time I was a
pet. Some people would say that once you've been a pet, once you've grown used
to the Leash, you're never quite human again—in the sense of being free. I
don't know about that. Of course, it is more
fun to be Leashed, but one can learn not to want it so
badly. I did. And this, in one sense, is the story of how I did it.
As a puppy. . . .
But
already I have made a botch of itl For will not most
of my readers resent such a phrase? Puppies, Pets, Masters, Leashes: the old
way of speaking has come to have almost the force of obscenity among the
zealous. And who in these times dares not to be among the zealous?
Yet, how am I to tell the story of my life as
a pet without
using a pet's language, without adopting his
attitudes? Surely the time must come to an end when every politician and
philosopher must conceal himself behind the mask of a
bare-bones, know-nothing prose. And am I then required to tell White
Fang's story from the point of view of a Dingo? Nol The
memoirs of a member of Louis XVI's court could not be set down in the rough
accents of a sansculotte—and I must
be allowed to write of White Fang as White Fang would have written of himself.
For the time being, let us leave Dennis White in abeyance—and let me say,
without more preamble, that as a puppy I was uncommonly happy.
How
could it have been otherwise? I was raised in the best kennels of the Solar
System. My young body was sportive, and so it sported. My education ranged
freely through the full scope of human knowledge, and yet I was never forced
beyond my inclinations. I enjoyed the company of my own kind as well as the
inestimable pleasures of the Leash. Lastly, I was conscious from earliest
childhood of possessing the finest pedigree. My father Tennyson White was a
major artist, perhaps the major artist, in a society that valued art
above all things else. No little bit of that glory rubbed off on his bloodline.
Later, in adolescence, a father's fame may cramp the expanding ego, but then it was enough to know that one was as valuable a pet as there could be.
It made me feel secure.
In what else does happiness
consist than in this: a sense of one's own value? Not in freedom, surely. For I have known that state, oh very well, and I can assure you that
it is far less happy. Had I been free in my childhood, I would almost
certainly have been wretched.
Actually,
when I speak of my childhood as being so idyllic, I refer chiefly to my first
seven years, for shortly after my seventh birthday I was orphaned—that is to
say, the Dingoes made away with my father, while Motherlove simply committed
Pluto and myself to care of the Shroeder Kennel and vanished into outer space.
Thus even at the age of seven I might have been said to be free, and it was a
condition I bitterly resented, thinking of it simply as neglect. Now, of
course, I can see that the Shroeder Kennel, by contrast to what we call
"the human condition," is truly Paradise. Then I only had the moons
of Jupiter to judge by. But I see I am making something of a jumble of this.
Perhaps it would be better to set about this in a more chronological fashion.
Let me make a narrative of this.
To begin my life with the beginning of my
life, as David Copperfield does, I record that I was bom on a Sunday afternoon
in the year of Our Lord 2017, on Ganymede, the fourth moon of Jupiter. At my
father's behest a gigantic thunderclap accompanied my birth, attended with
quite a smart display of meteors and artificial comets. These natural wonders
were succeded by a Masque written by my father and set to a reconstituted
Vivaldi cantata, in which various of the bitches of
the kennel took the parts of my fairy godmothers. The eleven fairies portrayed
were Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful,
Thrifty, Brave, and Clean. Each presented me with a little token emblematic of
the spiritual gift she was bequeathing to me, but my father had somehow
neglected to invite the twelfth fairy, Reverence, with fateful consequences for
my character.
In
speaking of my "earliest memories," I encounter difficulties, for I
cannot be sure at this late date which of my seeming memories are indeed mine
and which are borrowed from Motherlove, Pluto, or whichever other brain my Master
may have happened to pick for me. For instance, I have a distinct recollection
of Daddy (excuse me, but that is the name I know him by; he has no other)
looking yearningly into my eyes as he declaimed a poem, which I also remember
clearly though I dare not here repeat it. I think it is one of the Earl of
Rochester's. Daddy is wearing a shirt in the Byronic style, with billowing
sleeves and a soft, expansive collar. His tights are of black velvet, with
silver piping. His thin hair, blond almost to whiteness, hangs down to his shoulders.
His eyes are the deep blue of a Martian sky, and their blue is heightened by
contrast to the extreme pallor of his skin. Like his use of clothes and his
broad A, the pallor is sheer affectation. He might have been tan for the
asking.
Now
surely this is not my memory. Perhaps it is Mother-love's, though
she claimed, when I recited the poem for her, that she'd never heard such a
thing in her life (attempting all the while not to giggle). It could have been
the memory of any of a dozen bitches on Ganymede, for since Daddy was the
kennel's prize possession he was encouraged to bestow his favors liberally.
From the number of pedigreed descendants who could legitimately claim paternity
from him it seems evident that Daddy cooperated with this policy. I have never
met (and now I never shall meet) all my
half-brothers and half-sisters.
Another
memory that is more likely to have been mine is of Daddy from a vantage point
of about three feet from the ground. He is conventionally nude this time and
laughing to bust a gut. I can't remember the joke. This must have been one of
my last memories of him, for behind him I can make out the vivid green of a
Terran meadow and the light that plays across his body can only be the light of
the sun as it shines on our home planet, no more nor less. Even foreshortened
I can see that Daddy had then the body of an athlete—but so had everyone else
under the Mastery. Daddy was really quite modest in his somatic tastes, tending
toward the Cellini side of the scale, while the majority favored a more
Michaelangelesque style.
Of
my mother, Clea Melbourne Clift, I have more memories
but none so distinct. She had a type of classic handsomeness over which time
could not exercise his cruel authority: a noble brow; an unimpeachable nose;
lips that might have been sculpted of marble, so perfect was
their articulation. Indeed, from the tip of her toe to the highest-piled lock
of her perfectly composed hair, there was something about Clea Clift that
suggested the work of a stonemason. Clea was such a stickler for form. She always wanted me and Pluto to call her "Clea" or better,
"Miss Clift," and would become incensed if we ventured to use, in
moments of unconsidered fondness, the simpler "Mom," or Daddy's
slightly joking
"Motherlove." Had we been French, I daresay she would have insisted upon the formal vous and forbidden the familiar tu. Like so many women of her generation, the first to grow up under the
Mastery, Clea was something of a bluestocking and very jealous of her
independence. For Clea to have married and taken on the name of White,
reknowned though that name was and proud as she might be otherwise to be
associated with it, would have been in contradiction to the first article of
her faith: the sexes must be equal in all things.
Pluto and I didn't know quite how we were to
behave around Clea. She didn't want us to think of her as a mother, but more as
a sort of friend of the family. A distant friend. She
interested herself but little in our education, limiting her attentions to serving
us up with little snippets of history and culture-lore. The legend of van
Gogh's ear seemed to possess a special attraction to her for some reason, and
she related it to me in my comfy force-field gravity-pulse cradle in a dozen
variant forms, in which, successively, the character of van Gogh himself grew
more and more peripheral while that of his "girlfriend" became of
central importance. All I can recall of van Gogh's girlfriend now, however, was
that she had, like Motherlove, a classic nose and the ability to drive men mad
with love.
It
was Clea's distinction to have been the first puppy bom on Ganymede, which was
at that time and for decades after the premier kennel of the Solar System Daddy only came to Ganymede after the success of his novel,
A Dog's Life, when he was thirty-three years old. Daddy
says that at first Clea Melbourne Clift would have nothing to do with him. Only
when it appeared that his literary reputation was not to wane after a season of
notoriety, and more important, that Clea's aloofness had served only to open up
the field to candidates who would otherwise have stood little chance against
Clea's superior charms—only then did she relent. Too late.
A month sooner, and she might have constrained Daddy to monogamy, as he had
sometimes offered; as it was, she was lucky to win the position of "first
wife." Their romance resembled that of Romeo and Juliet, in the respect that the lovers' misfortunes
arose from their having failed, by ever so small a margin, to synchronize their
watches.
From
the very first they quarreled. I can remember in particular one night (a very
crucial one for this tale, for it was the night upon which its narrator was
conceived) when the several causes of their rupture had come to a head all at
once. Daddy had been taking his duties as a stud more seriously than usual and
was consequently not giving Clea all the attention she felt was her due.
Moreover, he had happened to make disparaging remarks upon Clea's interpretation
of some Shubert Leider.
(Have I mentioned that Clea
was a singer? No? Then let me at once make it clear that her voice was not her
prime attraction, or—for Daddy —any at all.)
Throughout
the argument I seem to see Clea's lovely face —usually a delicate tint of rose,
but now flushed an angry red—so I presume that this memory originated in
Daddy's mind; certainly its timbre, the
pervading irony, the sense that everything he says is "in quotes," is
his. But perhaps the whole scene is no more than a transparently Oedipal dream disguising itself as a borrowed
"memory." Or worse, what if truth and fancy, event and wish, have
become inextricably tangled, beyond the power of even a Tiresias to unknot
them?
Well then, I must use a sword and just hack
away. . . .
The scent of jasmine. The smoothness of Clea's skin beneath my hand.
Everything bathed in the pink glow of a desert
twilight. "Now, Clea," I can hear my voice saying, "we've been
through all this before. I have to do these things for the sake of the
kennel—to keep the standard up. You can understand that. Why—it should make you
proud."
She
moves away and veils her beauty, like a startled squid, in sworls of inky mist.
"Bother the kennel!" she whines. "If you really loved me as much
as you say, you wouldn't want to be off every night. ..
."
"That's just it, Clea my loveliest
bitch, I don't
want to be away from you.
But it's my duty, my vocation."
"And tonight, just because our Master's
given you the go-ahead. . . ."
"Isn't that a good reason? Don't you want another son?"
"But____ "
"And
don't you want the very best possible son [Meaning me] that you can possibly
have? Well then, Clea my lovely, tonight's the night. Be reasonable,
darling."
"Oh,
reason I" she says, with highest disdain. "You'll
always be right, if you use reason as an argument." But already the black
mists about her were beginning to disperse.
"If
you won't be persuaded logically, let me show you what I mean." Daddy's
mind calls for its Master, and in the same instant the
meshes of the Leash close around his and Clea's mind, linking them in
telepathic bondage. Argument is no longer possible; reason is subdued; only the
Vision persists, and that Vision is of me, of White Fang, the son who will be
theirs, the form potential in the chromosomatic patterns that their Master, a
reknowned breeder, had selected from the trillions of possible permutations
and combinations available to him during the several months past.
I
must say it is a good likeness, this Vision. The face is mine as surely as the
one I see every day in my bathroom mirror. Truly, I am now missing one or two
of the teeth that the model White Fang flashes in a smile, and I have a little
scar on my left cheek (it is only evident when I blush) which the prophecy did
not include. But these discrepancies are the work of environment, not heredity.
The body is as excellently put together as one might hope, though here again
environment has been making itself felt (I eat too much). Splendid
hind quarters and a handsome torso. The head is smallish, according to
the classic prescription, but well compact with intelligence for all that. And
of course, a flawless character: Trustworthy, Loyal, HelpfuL Friendly. . . .
"Oh, all right,"
Clea sighs.
I—or rather, Daddy—kisses her, and there I
had better bring this particular reminiscence to an end.
Of my first visit to Earth
in 2024 I have only the fuzziest recollection, for here I must fall back on my
own mnemonic resources. My chief impression seems to have been of sunlight,
the authentic, inimitable sunlight of Earth. Organs that have evolved under
particular conditions will naturally be most comfortable where those conditions
obtain, and thus no substitute, however artful, can provide just those balances
of color and intensity, those alternations of night and day, summer and winter,
hazy and clear, that our very cells will recognize, demand, and crave. Though
born on Ganymede, I knew from the first that Earth was my home.
But
I did not like it. In this certainly I was influenced by the example of my
Motherlove, for whom every day away from the civilized life of Jupiter was a
torment of boredom. "There is nothing to do," she would lament, when
Daddy had returned from his afternoon jaunts about the countryside.
"There's nothing to see, and nothing to listen to. I'm going out of my
mind."
"It won't be much longer now, Clea my
loveliest. Besides, this is good for you. Being out here in the country, off
your Leash and on your own, develops self-reliance and initiative."
"---- self-reliance and initiative!" Clea said with a stamp
of
her
gold-slippered foot. "I want my Leash. But it's not me I'm worried about.
It's the boys. It's been weeks since White Fang and Pluto have had any lessons.
There're running around these woods like a couple of wild Indians. Like Dingoes
I What if they were captured 1 They'd be eaten
alive."
"Nonsense. You'd think this were Borneo or Cuba, the way you go on. There aren't
any Dingoes in the United States of America in the year 2024. This is a
civilized country."
"What
about those people you said you met the other day—what was their name? The Nelsons. They were Dingoes."
"They
were just poor honest country folk trying to scratch a living out of the dirt.
Once you get through to them, they're very friendly."
"I
think it's disgusting!" Clea said, stretching out
in the little gravity-pocket of the Prefab that our'Master had left behind so
that we would not be utterly without the amenities.
"Talking with them. Eating their dirty food. You could catch
a disease."
"Then I'd call up the Shroeder Kennel
and be cured. Really, this part of Minnesota is just as civilized as anything
on Ganymede. I like it here. If I had my way. . . ."
"If
you had your way, we'd all become Dingoes! The Shroeder Kennel—don't talk to me about the Shroeder Kennel! Have you been
there? Have you seen the way the pets are treated on Earth?"
"Not to the Shroeder
Kennel exacdy, but. . .
"Well,
I have, and I can tell you it's barbaric. Those
poor pets live like animals. It's like something before the Mastery. They all
run around unleashed, in this awful sunlight, out-of-doors, among all these
loathsome vegetables. . . ."
"It's only grass, my
love."
"It's
disgusting. You're disgusting to want to live here. Why you wanted to bring me
and the children to this living hell, I'll never comprehend."
"I've
explained to you a dozen times—my work requires it. I can't even begin the
sequel until I've recaptured the feeling of the place—the sense of being
stranded here, of being without hope, of being mortal. . . ."
Motherlove
gave a little gasp of horror and covered her ears. The idea
of mortality— even the word—was too depressing. She went to the
medicine dispenser and dialed for a skyrocket, a mildly euphoric beverage
derived from LSD. In a little while she was hallucinating happily in her own
little pocket of gravity. Pluto and I wanted some drugs too, but Daddy promised
us he'd read us a chapter from A Dog's Life instead.
My father Tennyson White belonged to the
first generation of humans to grow up away from the planet Earth. Bom in 1980,
just ten years after the first manifestations, Daddy had been abandoned on the
steps of a power station. His first Master had been more interested in botanical
specimens than in caring for foundlings, and so his early education had been
erratic. Even so, it was such an education as no human had ever had before—with
the possible exception of John Stuart Mill-and one feels that Mill did pay a
rather steep price for his education. But with a Master assisting, one can be
as polymathematical as one would like. Language and science, music and
gymnastics —anything that requires more of competence and familiarity than of
creative insight—can become "second nature" with no more effort than
it would take to read a novel by, for instance, George Eliot.
At
the age of three Daddy was sold or traded or somehow exchanged (just how the
Masters arrange these matters among themselves none of their pets have ever
been given to understand; when asked, the Masters make an analogy to the gold
standard—but who has ever understood the gold standard?) and transported to the
asteroid Ceres, where his abilities were cultivated to the full by one of the
first truly great breeders. In fact, it was largely due to the successes of the
Master of Ceres that the study and breeding of homo sapiens gradually usurped the attention of all
Masters involved in Terran problems. Whether we are to be grateful to the
Master of Ceres for this is not within my province to judge. I only wish to
make it clear that, from the age of three to the age of twenty, Daddy could not
have wanted a better Master or more thorough cultivation.
Then
at the age of twenty it was discovered that Daddy had leukemia. Though it was
easily within the competence of his Master to have cured him of this wasting
disease (what was not within their competence, after all?), nothing
was done. As his Master explained to' Daddy, as he lay there in his sickbed, it
was considered unsporting
to tamper with basic
genetic materials, as any permanent cure would have required. Daddy protested
and was assured that his case was being debated in the highest councils of the
Mastery, but that it would be an indeterminate time before any decision could
be reached. Meanwhile Daddy was shipped back to Earth, much as a piece of
inferior merchandise might be returned to the factory. There, in an inferior,
overpopulated, and understaffed hospital in Northeastern Minnesota, haunted by
the knowledge that his life or death was nothing but a sporting proposition to the Masters, he
conceived of his great novel, A Dog's Life. He
began writing it the same day his Master announced to him that his leukemia was
going to be cured and that he would be allowed to return to his home on Ceres.
A Dog's Life was an epoch-making book—like Luther's Bible, or Das Kapital, or Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even the Masters read and admired it. Tennyson White received the Nobel
Prize, was elected to the French Academy, and was the first man to hold two
seats in the American Congress—he was the senior senator from Arizona and the
representative from the Ninth District in Minnesota. More than any other person,
it was he who effected the reconciliation of men and their Masters. And it was
just for that reason that the Dingoes—the small element of the population that
still resisted the sovereignty of the Master—had marked him for vengeance. It
was from A Dog's Life,
in fact, that they had
taken their name.
The
wonder of that novel is that it's told entirely from a dog's point of view—a real dog, a canine of the Industrial Revolution. The realistic surface is
never distorted by the demands of the allegory, and yet . . . And yet, no one
has ever surpassed Daddy in depicting their essential and unfathomable
alienness. As Woof to Mr. Manglesnatch, so man to his Master. The analogy is
almost infinitely extensible.
Before A Dog's Life, the
Dingoes (this is still the most convenient name to use when discussing the
various dissident elements prior to 2037, for though they went by any number of
names—Republicans, Baptists, Harvard Club, B'nai B'rith, etc.—they never could
come together on a good brand name to sell revolution) had used such words as
"kennel," "leash," and even "pet" as invectives.
Daddy's book rather turned the tables. It gave them the old
one-two-transvaluation-of all-values-sockeroo punch, as it were. Thus, it
became a point of pride to be a pet; to be domesticated was self-evidently a
superior state than to be wild. One has only to observe the difference between
a greyhound and a wolf, a clever Daschshund and a vulgar Dingo, to see why the
Masters are innately our. . . .Masters.
There
were other, more trifling consequences of the book's vogue. Everyone who read
it, everyone who was anyone, began to name his children after famous dogs.
There hasn't been a generation of puppies with stranger names since the Pilgrim
Fathers went off the deep end back in the seventeenth century. To mention only
those who have gone one to win fame on their own: Ladadog, Bobby Grayfriars,
Little Sheba, Rjntintin, Beautiful Joe, Snoopy, and See Spot Run.
The
reason that Daddy had returned to Earth yet once again, despite the unhappy
associations one would have expected him to have from his last sojourn there,
was that after a slight hiatus he was at work on a new novel that was to be a
sequel to A
Dog's Life. His
work proceded in absolute privacy, a privacy that even in the most
self-trans-cendant moments of being Leashed he would
not allow his Master to intrude upon. For this would have been to cast doubt upon
the value of the work as an authentic human creation.
The
days of his research project passed into weeks, the weeks into months.
Motherlove grew more and more vocal in her boredom, and since Daddy was not
usually about during the day for her to complain to, it fell upon Pluto and myself to bear witness to her wrongs and play endless rubbers
of three-handed bridge with her. It was not a very gratifying occupation for
two boys our age (I was seven; Pluto, ten), and we tried to be out of her way
whenever possible. We spent the daylight hours roaming the woods and exploring
the innumerable lakeshores and riverbanks of the area. It was impossible to get
lost, for we had a homing device that could instruct us how to retrace our
every step. We observed none of the cautions that Motherlove was always
inventing for us, and I'm sure that if we had been lucky enough to meet any
Dingo children we would have been delighted to befriend them and join their
wild games. Pluto and I were quite sick of each other by this time. Partly it
was the difference in age; partly the isolation (in two months almost anyone
becomes unendurable). I also think that a fundamental antipathy between Pluto
and myself extends right down to the core of our
pineal glands (which organ, Descartes tells us, is the residence of the soul).
And
so it came about quite naturally that it should be Pluto and I who discovered
the car—his late-vintage Volkswagen—overturned and just beginning to smolder
as we got there. The windshield was shattered into opacity with buckshot, and
the driver's seat was dark with blood. Even as we watched the automobile caught
fire, and we had to back away.
It did not take a woodsman to follow the
spoor of Daddy's blood to the edge of the forest. Apparently he was still
alive then, for there are evidences of a struggle all along the path into the
wood. Once or twice we called his name aloud, but the woods remained as silent
as death. Is there a better analogy?
It
was another day before the search party from Shroeder Kennel found the traces
of the pyre. The ashes were scattered all about the meadow. The Master of the
Shroeder Kennel identified the bloodstains on the edge of the clearing as
Daddy's and Daddy's alone, and the ear that they found nailed to the oak tree
was likewise identified beyond the shadow of a doubt. The severed ear was
given to Clea. It was perhaps exactly what she'd always wanted of Daddy. She
had a special locket made to contain it—a sort of reliquary.
As for the bulk of him, one could assume that
the Dingoes would have been thorough in disposing of the remains. It was
popularly believed (and I'm not sure myself that it isn't true) that the
Masters could have resurrected a body from utter hamburger.
A monument was built to him on the site of
the murder.
It
was a statue of Woof and Mr. Manglesnatch. Beneath the bronze figures was a
plaque with the inscription:
TENNYSON
WHITE 1980-2024 A Martyr to the Spirit of Domestication
There
was, as well, a quotation from his novel: "Ah, what bliss there is in
servitude!" The monument was later disfigured by Dingoes in ways too
hideous to be recalled.
CHAPTER 2:
In
which I am neglected shamefully by my Master, and I bloody my brother's nose.
The
Masters: let me say a few words about the Masters.
Perhaps
my dear readers will tell me that there is no need for me to put in my two-cents' worth on a topic so threadbare and tired
as the Mastery. It is considered good form these days to leave the subject alone, just as in the third and fourth centuries A.D. one
did not bring up the subject of the Trinity with strangers. Whether the Son was
of one substance with the Father, or of like substance, or perhaps of only similar substance
was a matter best left to each man's private conscience. The analogy extends
farther than I first intended, for the Masters were our gods, and though now their altars have been overturned, there is
still something a little holy (or unholy, which is almost the same thing) about
their empty shrines and temples. When gods die, they become demons and are
then, if anything, more troublesome than before.
But since most of the figures involved in the
present controversies on the essential nature of the Masters had not had the
benefit, as I have, of direct experience of them, I can justly claim a sort of
apostolic authority—a distinction that few of the controversialists will
begrudge me, I am sure.
As
nearly as we can know them, the Masters can be said to be a pure
electromagnetic phenomenon—formed of a "substance" that cannot be
called either "matter" or "energy" but which nonetheless
displays a potentiality
for either. No, that isn't
quite right, since I've not mentioned the neutrino. The neutrino is a
sub-atomic particle that has a mass of 0, a charge of 0, and a spin of -\-1á.
Well, the Masters, according
to the best authority (theirs), can be identified more or less exacdy (it
depends on a few other things) with that spin.
As a direct consequence of these wonderful
properties, the power of the Masters approached (should I not rather say "approaches"?) cosmic proportions, and their knowledge
approached omniscience. They were not quite infinite, but then what is?
Considered simply as a field of force (or as a potentiality for such) they
were, corporately, of a scope and dimension equal at least to the magnetic
field of the Earth. Beside them mankind is insignificant and laughable—or so it
often seemed in those
days. Like Jehovah in his
earlier, more anthropomorphic days, it was no problem at all for them to take
over the management of Earth from us. They were, if not altogether omnipotent,
potent enough for all our purposes and, presumably, for most of
theirs.
In
the strictest sense of the word, the Masters were unaccountable. One could
only accept them, reverence them, and hope for the best.
The best that one could hope for was the
Leash. Despite the hundreds of volumes written about it, the Leash has always
eluded description: the tides of knowledge that sweep through the mind; the
sense of being in communion with the most transcendental forces, of being a
spoke from the hub about which the universe is spinning; the total certainty that it affords; the ecstasy and the
consuming love. Naturally it didn't always reach those proportions. Sometimes
it was no more than a mild, diffuse sense of well-being—just the absence of
anxiety. But if the Leash had never been more than a tranquilizer it could
never have bound man as firmly as it did and made him love his servitude. What
was the Leash then, in fact?
First
let me say what it was not. It was not a "telepathic link" with the
Masters, any more than the tug of a leather leash on the jeweled collar of a poodle is speech.
It was the Masters' means
of communicating with us, truly—but they could communicate no more to us than
our minds were capable of receiving, and I can assure you that the depths of
the Masters will never be fathomed by even the best of our divers.
The
Leash was simply their touch.
Those floods of ecstasy it
brought were nothing more than the Masters' way of tugging on our collar. A
touch of their hand could transmute a human nervous system from gross lead to
gleaming gold, or scramble a brain into idiocy with, literally, the speed of
lightning, but it could not, without changing the nature of tlm beast, make a
man something he was not. They could not, in short, raise us up to their own
level.
Dusirable
as the Leash was, one could not coerce it. Like • Iin Nliilo
of grace, it came as a gift
or not at all. How often n pot was Leashed and the intensity of the bond
depended upon the whim or good will of one's Master. And here I must clear up
another popular misconception: all Masters are not alike. They have discrete and individual personalities, as any pet who
has had more than a single Master can tell you. Some of them seemed to be
deeply concerned for their pets' well-being. (How large this interest loomed in
the whole framework of any Master's life can never be known, for all that a pet can know about his Master is what sort of
interest he takes in pets.) Others simply put them into a kennel and let them languish there, scarcely ever bothering to Leash
them and put them through their paces. Such a master was the Master of the Shroeder Kennel.
Pluto
and I were placed in the Shroeder Kennel within a week of our father's assassination. Clea told us that it would be only
for a little while and then she would be back for us. Perhaps she meant it, but
I have always felt that her deed was very much on a par with that of Hansel and
Gretel's stepmother. Clea surely knew the sort of place the Shroeder Kennel
was, for we had heard her complain about it to our poor father. Daddy, we were
sure, would never have left us in such a joyless place. But Clea, now that
Daddy was out of the picture, now that the glamor was gone, simply didn't give
a damn for the two puppies he had given her.
In a
purely physical sense, we were well cared for, I'll grant that. The Shroeder
Kennel (named for a little town that had once occupied that site, of which it
had been said, in the days before the Mastery, that you could throw a frozen
turd from one end of town to the other without much experience as a pitcher)
had an excellent gymnasium, warm and cold pools, indoor tennis and golf
courses, good robotic instruction in all sports, and the kennel rations were
prepared with that exquisite simplicity that only the most refined tastes can
command. Our rooms, both public and private, were spacious, airy, and bright.
The central architectural feature of the Kennel, the jewel for which all else
was but the setting, was a reconstruction, perfect in every detail, of the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. (Why? I have always wondered. Why that? Why not Notre Dame, Salisbury, the
Frauenkirche?) The
reconstituted cathedral was set amid acres of English landscape gardening and
playing fields. Naturalness was everywhere the style of the thing, and it was
no less natural for being adjusted, indoors and outdoors alike, to our
convenience. Thus, in the summer the air was filtered and cooled, and in the winter
the dome that encompassed the kennel heated us and added extra hours of
sunlight and warmth to the brief northern days. The dome delimiting the kennel
was fully a mile in diameter, and within its bounds our comforts were secure
against the enmity of the Dingoes.
It
would have been an ideal existence—if only our Master had truly cared for us.
Motherlove left us at the gate of the
Shroeder Kennel at sunset of an autumn afternoon. Outside the dome, the ground
was sere and the tree branches already denuded; within, the grass was a
perpetual midsummer green, and though the leaves of the trees still crimsoned
and fell, they did so in graceful sequence so that there was never a
preponderance of decay. Motherlove blew us a parting kiss; then, wreathed in
baroque spires of golden light, like an irradiated Bernini Madonna, she
ascended into the clear blue sky of October. As her figure diminished to a
pinpoint and vanished, we felt our Leashes fall away (for no Master's influence
can extend beyond a dozen or so miles) and our minds stood naked in an alien
world—a world that, having just been the scene of our father's bloody death, we
could not suppose to be friendly.
In
the middle distance we could make out the spire of the cathedral, and,
supposing it to be the administrative center, we made our way toward it along a
neatly graveled path that circled a field where a gymnastic competition was in
progress. Five youths were running pell-mell along a dirt track in a race so
evenly contested that none of them could hold the lead more than a few meters
at a time. A distance away other young men hurled the discus and javelin, while
dispersed over the grass at regular intervals, like polka dots, pairs of
wrestlers strained against each other, groaning with effort. Each of these
gymnasts was blond, deeply-tanned, and constructed according to the
specification that Michelangelo had developed for his "David."
Neither Pluto nor I were of a mind to disarrange so splendid a grouping of
figures in a landscape by asking our way from them, any more than we would have
thought to disturb a display of china figurines on the mantel of a house we
were visiting for the first time. We pressed on cheerlessly to St. John's.
The
Master of Ganymede from whom Pluto and I had received our earliest education
had not been an enthusiastic archaeologist, so there had been few
reconstructions on Ganymede other than of a purely utilitarian sort—a
scaled-down version of Hampton Court, a couple of Palladian villas, that sort
of thing. Nothing monumental. Our first impression of
St. John the Divine was out of proportion, therefore, to anything but its
proportions. It is a vulgar building, but it is an incredibly big building. With my chin hanging slack and my heart pumping at
double-time, I stretched out my hand to touch the torus at the base of one of
the gigantic columns at the rear of the nave. It was cool and tingly, reminding
me that what here seemed to be stone was in fact much less substantial: an
immensely strong force-field with a skin of matter only one molecule thick. It
was this stagey method of construction (let me assure you, though, that the
illusion was perfect, the stagecraft consummate) that made
"architecture" a matter of such indifference to the Masters. Under
such conditions munificence was taken for granted, and taste became the sole
consideration.
Though
it was empty, there was something about the cathedral that made Pluto and me
wish to stay there. The sheer magnitude of the place seemed to put our little
problems into perspective. What could we possibly
matter beneath a ceiling as high as all that? It is the size of the gods, and
nothing else, that endears them to their worshippers.
The best god is simply the biggest.
(Forgive
me, dear reader, these little wanderings from the true
path of narrative. Theology is my special vice, but I must learn to keep a
tighter rein on it.)
Shortly
after we had entered the cathedral, a solitary worshipper came in behind us: a
young lady of indeterminate age (I would have guessed eighteen, and I would
have been wrong), wearing clothes of a most improbable cut, and a complexion so
white that a geisha might have envied her. She blessed herself at the font,
then walked down the center aisle with such a deal of swaying and unsteadiness
that one feared, despite the voluminous base provided by her hoop skirt, that
she would topple at every step. Her black hair was done up in an artful and
complicated style and was surmounted by a bonnet of even greater complications—a
construction of cloth, flowers, jewels, and papier mache that seemed to vie
with the high altar for the attention of the faithful. It seemed a shame that
there was no one but Pluto and myself present to
admire it. When this mirror of fashion had reached the foremost pew of the
nave, she genuflected (I thought
she had really toppled then), entered, and knelt in an attitude of devotion,
reading from a little black book she had taken from her reticule.
We
approached respectfully, wondering if it was right to come into such a building
unclothed. It was my first intimation of guilt, and I did not like it.
Pluto
reached a timid hand out to pull at her puffy sleeve for attention, and the
woman (one could see she was not such a
young lady after all) turned a cold eye upon us. "What is it? Can't you
see I'm reading? Why don't you go bother a robot? That's what they're for. WelL
don't just stand there gaping. What is it you want? Speak up I"
"Please,
Miss," Pluto stammered, "we're the new puppies, and we don't know
where to go."
"Go
to a robot, of course. Do J look like a robot? Does
this" (gesturing with her little black book at the vasty spaces of the
cathedral) "look like a schoolroom?"
"Could
you take us to a robot, please? Because we're lost, you know."
"Hotherl" the woman exclaimed.
From
the first, you can see, there was something daunting about Roxanna Proust, as
though the very melancholy in which she wrapped herself up were an actively
aggressive force. She was at almost all times steeped in emotion. She didn't seem to care what
flavor it was either, just as long as she got lots of it. Even before we had
interrupted her, she had been crying into her book, and, as she scolded us,
there were still two tears trembling in the comers of her dark eyes. The skin
thereabouts was scrunched into a great delta of wrinkles, as though from the
pressure of squeezing out the tears. She had a prominent nose in profile, with
a good cutting edge to it, and a small, slighdy recessed chin that would
tremble in moments of stress; that is, usually. She wore quantities of jewelry,
especially rings, with the idea that an opulence of ornament would compensate
for the general spareness of her own person. Yet for all this, she did give one
the impression of a sort of beauty, a rare and highly frangible sort.
Pluto
broke under the pressure and began crying . . . not, I suspect, without a
certain childish cunning. "B-but we're lostl We're orphans. We're all alone!"
Roxanna's
delta of wrinkles narrowed under the pressure of a thought. "What did you
say your names were?"
"My
name's Pluto, and he's White Fang. He's my little
brother."
"Your
last name, child!"
"White."
"Your
father was Tennyson White? The Tennyson White?" Pluto nodded. Roxanna made a sound rather like a bird of prey swooping
down on a field mouse. "You poor dear darlings!"
Even as this cry echoed and reechoed in the cathedral vaults, Roxanna laid
down her book and caught up Pluto and myself into the dark, ample folds of her
dress, as if she were netting us. "Why didn't you say so? Oh my little pets! My loves!"
With
such endearments and as many others as she knew, she lead Pluto and myself out
of the cathedral. Only when we got to the bronze doors did she remember her
little black book. She regarded the two of us a moment calculatingly, then
pointed a heavily bejeweled forefinger at me: "You! Run back and fetch my
book, will you? That's a good dog."
I
was only too eager to please her and at the same time escape a little while
from a presence that was, like a room in which a bottle of perfume has been
broken, a little overpowering.
When
I had found Roxanna's book, I opened it to the title page out of curiosity and
discovered it was not, as I had imagined, a prayerbook, but something in French
that I'd never heard of called La
Recherche du Temps
Perdu (Volume IV: La Prisonnière) by somebody called Marcel Proust.
Aside from the robots and teaching machines
that looked after us, it was chiefly Roxanna Proust who undertook the
responsibility of our education. Faute
de mieux. Tant pis.
Roxanna taught us French, reading long
passages to us from her favorite author (from whom she had appropriated her
surname). Even now, when I wish, I can close my eyes and hear her voice again,
shrill with didacticism: "Proust! Proust is the great spirit of our age!
No one but Proust has seen so profoundly into the depths, the veritable abysses, of the human character. No onel Only Marcel
Proust!" I sometimes wondered if she had read any other book in her life
besides the Remembrance
of Things Past. She
taught us German by reading a German translation of Proust. She taught us the
history of literature by comparing all other authors to Proust. (There was no
comparison.) If she could have taught us mathematics by reading Proust, she
would have done that too.
She
despised all other novelists, with but one exception: Daddy. "He did have
a certain degree of literary skill," she had informed us shortly after our
arrival. "I'm sure that if he had been able to continue, he would have
learned to profit from Proust's example."
It
is possible that Roxanna's attentions were not entirely due to her selfless
concern for the development of our literary taste. She was only too well aware
that her talents were not widely appreciated at the Shroeder Kennel, where the
emphasis was so much on athletics. She languished in the intellectual night of
Shroeder, much as Chekhov's Three Sisters languished in the provinces, always
dreaming of that wonderful, never-to-be day when they would go to Moscow.
Roxanna's Moscow was the asteroids, and she was hopeful that Pluto and I, sons
of the eminent Tennyson White, would get her there more readily than her own
rather limited attainments and a pedigree she blushed even to mention.
(Roxanna had been born on a nearby farm to a family with the unhappy name of
Skunk.)
It was an eclectic education, but there was
no one else about with even a fraction of Roxanna's talent, special as it was.
Most of the pets at Shroeder lived their fives between the gymnasium and the
boudoir. For my own part, I'll confess that I spent more time exercising and
playing games than I did in the education booths or at Roxanna's feet Without the intellectual stimulation and aid of the Leash,
literature has not been my natural inclination.
Pluto
was different. Pluto loved to read, and he sucked right up to the Skunk Lady
(as she was generally known at Shroeder). Under her guidance he began to write.
Not surprisingly his first style (at age ten) was very derivative of Proust.
The next year he began to sound more like Joyce, and by the time he was pushing
thirteen he came into his own.
That
was a red-letter day in Pluto's life—the day he found his own style—and I
remember how he came running across the playing field to drag me away from a
rough session of gymnochess. I was a bit peeved, since White was winning, but I
liked to humor Pluto in these things, since he had almost no other audience at
Shroeder and I knew he was lonely.
He
wouldn't read Ceremony
(the title of his work) to
me out-of-doors, but insisted that I come to the Cathedral, which was empty
every day but Sunday, the one day when our Master would gather his pets
together and give them an hour on the Leash of full-pressure beatitude. Once in
the cathedral, Pluto put on what he called "vestments," oddments of
clothing he scraped together from the theatrical wardrobes, and insisted I do
the same.
"This
is going to be a ceremony," Pluto informed me in a whisper. "So you have to fold your hands together like this and not
say anything till I'm done with it." He lighted a candle and threw on a
tape of organ fuges that sounded peculiarly hollow here, since the walls lacked
the acoustical properties of real stone. Candle in hand, he marched up the
steps to the pulpit in time to the music, where in an uneven adolescent
baritone, he began to declaim from Ceremony.
"Ceremony. Part One: Worship of the Muse. First, an oration composed by Plutonium
Keats White. Ahem! Art! Art is a thing of futile beauty. It has no part in our
lives, or very little, and it is as unsuitable at moments of great stress as it
is silly on occasions of state. It has an
affinity to death. Its greatness is the greatness of a king resigned to his fate. It is defeatist.
It is not the sort of thing you would inculcate in children, for"—and
here he stared down at me in his gravest manner—"it might kill them in too large a dosage. Art is the way we delay our departure, but it is no way to start the day."
He
seemed to have finished, and I clapped—rather mildly, I'm afraid. "It's nothing like Proust," I assured him. "And I don't think you could say Joyce influenced it
very much either."
"Quietl
That was only Part One. Part Two is called The
Sacrifice,' and for that part you have to get down on your knees and hold out
your hands so I can tie them together."
I laughed, thinking he was making a joke.
"On your knees, you little son of a bitch!" he screamed at me.
I
cannot say what my reply was to this strange demand, except to suggest that I
had first discovered the expression in a
novel by J.D. Salinger.
It
is difficult to say which of us was responsible for the fight. Pluto did come storming down from the pulpit in what was for him a berserker rage.
He did strike the first blow. But all this while I continued to shout
"(Salinger) 1" at him, and he could claim to having been provoked.
Pluto
was thirteen, I a mere ten; Pluto was quite five feet tall, I only a bit over
four. But Pluto was a creampuff, and my three years of gymnastics made the
contest almost even. He kicked and bit and flailed about and made some really
splendid loud noises, but before I'd even warmed to the task he was in retreat.
I managed to put a good rip in his foolish "vestment" and dyed it a
noble red with the blood from his noble nose. At last he admitted that
everything I'd said about him was true, and I let him get up from the floor.
He
ran straight to the power station to signal our Master On the emergency switch, something no other pet had ever dared to do, since
the Master of Shroeder didn't like to be bothered. I am amazed—to this day I am
amazed—that it was I who was punished and not Pluto. He started the fight.
A bloody nose! What is so dreadful about a
bloody nose?
It
was not a dire punishment. In some ways it was scarcely a punishment at all.
It was just done to guarantee that I would be less inclined to shed blood in
the future. I was conditioned, irrevocably, to respond to the sight of blood,
be it ever so small a gout, with nausea and vomiting,
succeeded by fainting. In all my years as a pet, my conditioning was never
put to the test, but later there would be occasions, bloody occasions. . . .
But I am getting ahead of myself. Everything in due order.
CHAPTER 3:
In which I meet Darling,
Julie, and fly away to Swan Lake.
I have always considered that my adult life began at the
age of ten. Before that age my memory can only reconstruct a chronology of
events from a few key images. Everything is suppositive, as it were. But from
age ten on, I can remember whole days exactly as they happened.
The
whole day I would take most pleasure in remembering is the Fourth of October,
2027, a Wednesday. On Wednesdays in good weather Roxanna would take Pluto and
me out into the country, beyond the dome of the kennel. We drove along the
dusty country roads in a special little cart operated by solar tap and covered
with an invisible but nonetheless reassuring bubble-shield so strong that not
even the Masters themselves could break through it once it was switched on. Not
that we had to worry about such an eventuality (we would have been only too
happy if a Master would break in and Leash us), but the Dingoes had become more
and more of a nuisance since the incident three years before of my father's
assassination. Several pets visiting Earth for their pleasure had been done
away with in similar ways, with nothing left to bury but ashes. In half an hour
we would arrive at a deserted farm, where, in the shade of overburdened apple
trees, we would pursue our studies or, if Roxanna felt indulgent toward us,
explore the old farm buildings, and rusting machinery. We never went into the
house itself though. The aura of Dingoes still clung to it, and in any case
Roxanna had absolutely forbidden it.
Only
years later did Roxanna admit to us what we had known all along—that this had
been her parents' farm, a-bandoned during the Great Collapse of 2003, when the
economy of those humans who were still holding out against the Mastery fell
completely into ruin. The Skunks (their name was still legible on the mailbox)
had volunteered themselves and their children for the nearest kennel—Shroeder,
as it happened. The children had been accepted, but the parents had been judged
unfit and sent away, as by that time most older
volunteers were. The Masters had no more need of wild pets (who could never be
perfectly domesticated), for now they were breeding their own and (so it seemed
to us pets) doing a better job of it than Man ever had.
It was principally from kennel rejects like
the Skunks that the society of Dingoes, as we know it today, has evolved, and
this no doubt accounts for the scent of sour grapes that clings to so many of
them and even, a little, to Roxanna— as I think I've already pointed out.
It was late in the afternoon, and Roxanna,
tired of reading, was fanning herself with a perfumed handkerchief and
reminiscing to Pluto about her country childhood and how different the world
had been then. She told about her father's drinking bouts on Saturday nights
and how he would come back home and beat Roxanna's
poor mother terribly. She had never witnessed these beatings, but she had heard
them and assured us they were terrible. For Pluto and myself,
such tales confirmed our worst imaginings about the Dingoes. I, having but
recently bloodied my brother's nose, was persona non grata and accordingly I had gone up into the branches of the apple tree,
higher than Pluto dared climb, to work problems in calculus, which I had just
begun to study. Suddenly there appeared as in a vision, suspended in the air
before me almost near enough to touch, a girl of about my own age. Wisps of
heliotrope spiraled about her bare, sun-bronzed body, and her white hair
gleamed in the dying sunlight as though it were itself luminescent.
"Hello,"
she said, "my name is Darling, Julie. Darling is my last name, but you can
call me Julie if you like. Don't you want to play with me?"
I
couldn't reply. I was stunned—as much by her loveliness (yes, I was only ten,
but children are not insensible of these things; perhaps not so
insensible as we are) as by the shock of meeting a stranger in
those unlikely circumstances.
She
took a step toward me, smiling (Darling, Julie has always had the loveliest,
cheek-dimpling smile), and I realized what would have been immediately evident
to any well-brought-up pet: that it was her Master's unseen presence that
supported her. For him, anti-gravity would be a moment's improvisation. But our
Master's neglect had made even such commonplaces as flight seem rare and
wonderful to us.
"Aren't
you Leashed?" she asked, seeing that I hesitated to step off my branch and
meet her halfway.
"No—none of us
are."
By
this time Roxanne and Pluto had become aware of our visitor, but since they
were a good ten feet below Julie and me, it was awkward for them to join the
conversation. It was awkward for me, for that matter, but I blustered on.-
"Would you like an apple?" I asked,
picking one from the abundance about me and offering it to her. She stretched
forth her hand, then with a guilty look drew it back.
"My
Master thinks I'd best not," she explained. "He's says that sort of
food is for Dingoes. You're
not a Dingo, are you?"
"Oh nol" I blushed, and Julie
laughed.
"Well, you look like a Dingo to
me." I should have realized at once that this was all teasing, for there
could be no serious doubt of our domestication. Dingoes wear clothing, and pets
(who never have to be ashamed of their bodies) only dress for the theatre or a
pageant or (like Roxanna) out of perversity. "If you're not a Dingo, why
don't you step off that silly old tree branch and prove it?"
From
the first I've always behaved like a fool for Darling, Julie. I did just as she
suggested and began falling, in obedience to Newton's laws, directly toward
Roxanna. Then, with a funny little internal somersault, I felt myself caught up
in the anti-gravity belt supporting Julie. Julie swooped down, giggling, and
caught hold of my hand, and in the same moment I felt the meshes of the Leash
close over my mind. Beneath us, Roxanna had fainted. Pluto was trying to revive
her. Each time he slapped her face, she groaned deliriously.
"What a silly game," Julie
commented. Then, letting go my hand, she leaped into the accommodating air to a
height of thirty feet and hung here, secure as a ping-pong ball suspended by a
jet of air.
"Try and catch me!" she shouted,
and then sailed off on a long parabola that ended behind the sagging roof of
the old barn.
"What about me?" Pluto protested.
"I want to fly too."
"You're
probably too old, but 111 ask her," I promised. Then I flew off to catch
Julie, and Pluto saw no more of me or Julie for a good two hours. She led me
quite a chase, high into the clouds, skimming the branches of the nearby scrub
woods, skipping like stones over the smooth waters of Lake Superior. We were
both delightfully exhausted before she let me catch her.
When
I had caught my breath back, I asked her what kennel she came from.
"Oh, it's a new kennel out in the
asteroids. You've probably never heard of it. Not yet," she added patriotically.
"And what are you doing here? I mean, the Skunk farm isn't really a crossroads. Why come to Earth at
all, if you've got a nice kennel in the asteroids?"
"Well,
my Master needs more stock, and he brought me along to help him choose. Things
are cheaper on Earth, and my Master has to count his pennies. That's what he
tells me anyhow. As far as I'm concerned,"
she finished loyally, "I'd rather live at Swan Lake than anywhere else in
the universe."
I
wanted to say that I felt exactly the same way, but instead I put in a good
word for Shroeder's rugby field and tennis courts.
Julie suddenly grew dejected. "Oh dear,
then you won't want to come back with usl I'd been hoping so much. . . ." "Ask me. Don't jump to conclusions."
"Will you come back to
Swan Lake with me? Please!"
Her
Master's voice resonated in my mind, echoing Julie's plea: Will you?
Her Master? No—now he was mine! I didn't have to answer
Julie's question for our Master conveyed my happy assent to her mind. Her own
delight bounced back like a well-returned ball in a friendly game of tennis.
"What
about my brother? You'll want him too, won't you?" (It's amazing how
accomplished a hypocrite one can be at ten years of age.)
"Well, naturally!
After all, you're both Whites."
I
was more than a little shocked. Aside from Uncle Tom's Cabin, I had never come across examples of race
prejudice. "Some of my best friends—" I began indignantly.
"Oh, not that kind of White, silly! Tennyson White.
The most famous novelist in the last fifty years. And
you're his sons. The only ones, I might add, who haven't been snapped up by top
kennels. I wouldn't say a word against Shroeder, you understand, but I really
think you can do better. Why, the two of you are worth all the other pets in
that kennel taken together!"
Now, of course, I realize that that kind of
talk is undemocratic and subversive, but then my tender mind, depraved by the
false values of the Mastery, was flattered by such a compliment. I even thanked Julie for it.
"I've told you my
name. But you haven't told me yours."
"White Fang," I
said, still swollen with pride.
"Fang,
White. That's a funny name. I don't see you as 'Fang, White,' at all. I think 111 call you Cuddles instead."
I
should have objected then and there, but I was anxious lest I offend her and
lose my ticket to the asteroids. And that's how it happened that, for the next
ten years of my life, I was known as Cuddles to all my friends.
When Julie and I returned to the Skunk
farmhouse, we found that Roxanna and Pluto had tired of waiting for us and
returned to the kennel in their bubbletank. Julie and I took a direct route,
skimming the treetops of the twilit woods, protected against the chill of the
October evening by our Master's thoughtfulness.
Within
a few minutes of our return, Julie's Master had negotiated the transfer of myself and Pluto from the Shroeder Kennel to Swan Lake.
Roxanna protested that he could not interrupt our literary studies at this
crucial point. We must either remain at Shroeder or she must be allowed to accompany
us to the asteroids. I leave it to the reader to imagine which course Roxanna
had in mind. But to all her pleadings and threats, the Master of Swan Lake was
coldly indifferent. Roxanna's pedigree was worthless; her physical person
possessed an at-best-problematical beauty; her literary attainments extended no
farther than her appreciation of Proust, an author for whom the Master of Swan
Lake had the lowest regard. Roxanna cried; she fainted; she tore her hair. It
was all to no avail. At last, when Pluto had gathered together all his scraps
of poetry, and we were ready to go, Roxanna bade us farewell with a curse.
The trip to the asteroids was made that night
as we slept. What means our new Master employed to transport us, I could not
say. Nothing so crude as a spaceship. The Master's
technology was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and
I will admit, for my own part, that mechanical
engineering isn't really that interesting to me.
We
woke to the subdued luminescence of kennel walls that we had known all our
lives. The walls shifted to livelier color schemes in response to the
quickening neural patterns of our waking minds. For a moment I feared that we were still back at Shroeder.
But
there was this difference: instead of the relentless drag of Earth gravity, a
gentle gravitational pulse, a relaxed ebb-and-flow, seemed to issue from my own
heart.
I felt the Leash of my new Master close more
tightly over my mind (for the next ten years it would never entirely desert
me, even in sleep), and I smiled and whispered my thanks to Him for
having brought me away.
Julie
was awake now too, and with a wave of her arm and a flourish of synthetic hom-music,
the walls of the kennel dissolved, and I beheld the boundless, glowing landscape of
the asteroids.
I gasped.
It is yours, said a voice in my head that would soon come
to seem as familiar as my own.
Hand
in hand, Julie and I sailed out over this phantasmagoric
playground, and the spheres of heaven played their music for us. Exotic
blossoms exploded like Roman candles, discharging hoards of rich perfume.
Colors wreathed us in abstract, joyous patterns, as the two of us bounded and
tumbled through the shifting fields of gravity, like starlings caught in a
dynamo.
CHAPTER 4:
In which I am perfectly
happy.
It
was paradise.
What more can I say?
Oh, I know that's cheating. I know I have to try. But consider the immensity of the task; consider how many better men
than I have tried and failed. Milton's heaven is a bore; his Eden, though nioe
enough at first glance, has a deadly sameness about it. Dante did rather
better, but even so most of his admirers find it more difficult to soar through
his Empyrean than to climb the steep side of Purgatory or slough through Hell's
mires. On the whole, Heaven is best left in the hands of the gods.
Let me begin, then, with something easy, like
geogra-
phy------
Swan
Lake was composed of twelve smallish asteroids, which our Master had artfully
woven into a sort of celestial clockwork. The interwoven trajectories of the
twelve asteroids had been determined with such niceness that the whole
configuration—from twelve o'clock to twelve o'clock, as it were—came full
circle once every hundred years. It was thereby possible with just a glance at
the sky to determine the year, the month, the day of the week, and—within a few
minutes—the hour, providing of course that one could remember the code. The
largest of these asteroids, Tchaikovsky, was a scant ten miles in diameter, and
the least, Milhaud, was a tawdry rock not five thousand feet from pole to pole.
The main kennels and all permanent installations of any size were on
Tchaikovsky, but any pet could travel freely to the other asteroids along broad
slipstreams, or—if he was feeling his oats—just by jumping, since the gravity
was a piddling .03 that of Earth anywhere outside the kennel proper. The
kennels themselves were all gravitized at a comfortable .85, just as they had
been at Shroeder.
Swan
Lake, though done up in better taste than other kennels I have known, was built
along the usual lines. The walls, the floors, all the elements of construction
were force-fields wrapped in microscopically thin layers of stuff—atoms,
molecules, that sort of thing. The only permanent feature in any room was a
console that any pet knew how to operate. This console controlled temperature,
humidity, wind velocity, illumination, fog effects, gravity, and dimensions.
The dimensional control was extremely complex, and only a professional
architect of long experience (or a Master) knew all its ins and outs. Most of
us contented ourselves with a selection from the thousand or so presetttngs:
Louis Sixième, Barnyard, Dracula's Castle, Whale-belly,
Sahara, Seraglio Steamroom, etc. There was a special dial that controlled the
degree of realism or stylization of any of these scenes, and one could produce
some very uncanny effects by, for instance, demanding a totally abstract Bronx
Renaissance living room or an ultra-realistic Pleistocene swamp. And the
effects one could get by spinning the
dial... I
No
more! I can't stand remembering these things. The happiness-Stoicism, White
Fang old boy, stoicism! Actually, Julie and I spent most of our time
out-of-doors, dashing in and out among the asteroids. The ten asteroids
intermediate in size between Tchaikovsky and Milhaud were, in descending order:
Stravinsky, Adam, Pugni, Prokofiev, De-libes, Chopin, Glazunov, Offenbach, Glière, and Nabakov.
As
my readers may have gathered from this list, the Master of Swan Lake was
something of a balletomane. For each of his asteroids was named after a
composer of notable music for the ballet—or, a slight but telling distinction,
of music for notable ballets. In fact, all of
Swan Lake had been fashioned, all the pets had been gathered there, to serve
this single passion of our Master, which was, I hasten to add, our passion too,
our entire purpose, and our highest happiness next to the Leash itself.
Oh,
hell, I should never have started to try to explain! I might have known I'd end
up like this, muttering dithyrambs.
I was explaining, a little ways back, how
Julie and I would go sailing out among the asteroids. Now such times as we did
this, we were dancing. In fact all the time we were at Swan Lake, all those ten
years, we never stopped dancing. And as we would soar past any one of the
asteroids, our passage would trigger a recording—a miniaturized electronic
orchestra, actually—that would play the single composition of that composer
which most suited our velocity, trajectory, idiorhythmic morion, and mood. It
could also improvise transitions from and to any piece of music in the
repertoire of any of the other asteroids. These transitions were often the most
amazing passages of all (imagine a collaboration between Offenbach and
Stravinsky!), which encouraged us never to linger overlong in one vicinity but
to be ever flitting about like will-o'-the-wisps.
There
were other machines that served the same purpose as a crew of stagehands,
managing the lights, providing props, laying scenes when the music demanded
something more specific than fireworks. . . .
And
machines that released scents that were harmonized with the other elements,
synaesthetically. . . .
Yes,
and finally there was us—Julie and me and the other pets. The ensemble. It was on our account that Swan Lake had been put together, so that our
revels never would be ended, so that we would have music wherever we'd go. I
say we danced, but that will not convey to most of my
readers just what we did. For the average Dingo, dancing is just an exercise
preliminary to mating. It provides a release of certain powerful tensions along
socially approved channels. When we danced,
it was nothing so crude as that. Everything we did,
everything a person could
do, became part of our
dance: our dinners, our lovemaldng, our most secret thoughts, and our silliest
jokes. The dance integrated all these disparate elements into an aesthetic
whole; it ordered the randomness of life into immense tapestries. Not Art for Art's Sake, but Life for Art's Sake was our motto.
How
am I to explain this to Dingoes? There was nothing wasted. I think that's the important thing. Not a
word or thought or glance between two persons but that there was a deeper
meaning to it. It fit, just as in a piece of music that observes the canons
each chord has its place in the melodic succession.
Here
again was the old Romantic idea of a synthesis of the arts: the same that
inspired Wagner's Bayreuth or Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. But the Master of Swan Lake
had resources to accomplish what those men fumbled for— and his chief resource
necessarily was his dearly beloved pets—us. He pampered us, he coddled us, he got us into trim. Not only physical trim (even the most
negligent Master would see to that); more even than mental trim. In fact, too much acuity could be a disadvantage. Daddy's Masters
on Ceres and Ganymede had developed their pets' intellects more than our Master altogether approved. There had always been something
over-refined about that first generation of pets. Pope somewhere says of
Shakespeare that he was an "unpolished diamond." Well, what might not
Shakespeare have said of Pope? The important thing, as we saw it, was not to be
witty and cultivated and bright, but to be sincere. We of the second generation found our parents
style dry, over-intellectual, unbecomingly ironic. We wanted to simplify, and
since the material of our art was our own lives, we simplified ourselves. Like
Young Werther, we cultivated a certain willful naivete. Not only did we make a
dance of our lives, but we turned the simplest statements —a "thank
you" or a "by your leave"—into a sort of rhapso-dy.
It was certainly paradise, but what would not have been paradise with Darling, Julie there? It is nice to have a
Master, but it is necessary to have a mate—as Woof observes somewhere in A Dog's Life.
How
to speak of her? Putting Julie "into words" is like sculpting in
quicksilver. There was nothing constant about her, nothing you could call hers. The color of her hair changed from day to day; her eyes were blue or
brown or hazel, as the mood came upon her; her figure might be lithe as a
nymphette or buxom as a Rubens. It all depended on the role she had to play.
For
Julie essentially was an actress. I have seen her dance the major roles in the
classical repertoire; I have seen her improvise; when I've been Leashed with her I've looked into the furthest recesses of
her charming mind. And never have I glimpsed even a hint of the real, the
quintessential Julie—unless it was an infinite capacity for pretending. She was
Juliet and Lucrezia Borgia in equal measure; she was both acts of Giselle; she was Odette and Odile, the black swan and
the white swan too. She was whoever it might occur to
her that she might be. And she was lovely.
We
were only sixteen, Julie and I, when our first child was bom to us. The High
Mass that celebrated Petite's christening was based on the standard Roman
model and set, sweetly, to Mother Goose melodies. My brother Pluto officiated
at the ceremony and delivered a sermon in verse of his own composition in honor
of the occasion. Since all of us present at the ceremony were in telepathic
rapport with him, our appreciation of the sermon was equal exactly to Pluto's
(who admired it greatly), but I have had a chance recently to reexamine his
verses with more dispassion, and I wonder. . . .
But
let my readers judge for themselves. The following is
Pluto's sermon in its entirety. It is meant to be read under bright lights with
a slight scent of musk, as of a diaper pail opened briefly in a nearby room.
Like most work he was turning out at that time, it should be delivered in a
loud voice with something of a Gregorian chant:
Scrumptious ornament,
Bubbling liquid joy!
Thing, thing, energy, energy, thing!
Dearly beloved, let us pray.
Let us bump-dee bump-dee play!
Petite
jeune fille, jolie et bonne!
Mr.
Wopsle, Lady Flutter,
Caracas
Venezuela O!
Thing,
thing, energy, energy, thing!
Amalgamation, splendid event To celebrate berserk the little girl: Petite jeune fille,
jolie et bonne, helas!
Considering that this was how our little
Petite got her start in life, I think she's done pretty well.
I should explain at once, since the subject
has intruded itself here, that there was nothing promiscuous about Swan Lake.
The hearth was sacred to us, the marriage bed a shrine. In this we differed
from the cynical libertinism of our forebears—not through any want of libido,
but really from an excess of it. For us monogamy was a continually passionate
state. Anything else would have been less. Moreover, our Master did have fixed
ideas on the subject of organic breeding (as he called it), and perhaps he
sometimes assisted our natural inclination to monogamy by weeding out
adulterous thoughts from our minds' neat gardens in order to further these
policies of his and, incidentally, to keep the prices up.
It
may be, as contemporary critics have suggested, that the New Domesticity of the
Twenties and Thirties was a highly artificial condition—a fashion if not
merely a fad. But cannot the same charge be grought against Victorian sentimentality?
Against the Moslem purdah? Against
all institutions whatever? The difference between a folkway and a
fashion is one of degree, not of kind.
What
I mean to establish by all this is the simple fact that though we lived in Swan
Lake ten years, we were always true to each other, Julie to me and me to
Darling, Julie. And if anyone ever dares insinuate anything to the contrary, he
will have to answer to me for it—and I shall accept no answer slighter than the
forfeit of his life.
It was paradise.
Really,
my dear readers, it was almost
paradise. Illness and pain
were banished from our lives, and it may have been (for I know of no instances
to disprove it) that so long as we stayed Leashed, death too had lost its
sting. Women no longer brought forth children in sorrow, nor did men eat their
bread salted by the sweat of their brows. Our happiness did not degenerate into
boredom, and our pleasures were never dampened by an aftertaste of guilt.
Paradise
has a considerable flaw, however, from the narrative point of view. It is
anti-dramatic. Perfection doesn't make a good yarn, because it doesn't have to
go anywhere.
Perfection is happy right where it is. So
there isn't much for me to tell you about Swan Lake, except: I liked it.
I liked it; for ten years
that was the story of my life.
And
so here we are in the year 2037 already, time having flown. By the angle of
declination between Glazunov and Chopin I can see that it was August. We were
in a large marble courtyard, where Julie was teaching four-year-old Petite to
pirouette. The sky flickered violently, and an oblig-gato of hunting horns
announced visitors from outer space. At the console, I called up a triumphal
arch from the willing ground so that our guests might enter in style. I turned
the gravity up to a more formal 1.05, and poor little Petite went into a
tailspin and plopped down to the floor, dismayed and giggling.
The horns quieted, and an anguished metallic
din split the air, as of an anvil being struck—but no, it was only a pet
striding forward through the arch. He wore armor in the Attic manner, very
leathery and crusted with gauds, and his face was hidden behind a grotesque
iron mask. Gaily waving a mace-and-chain, he shouted his greeting aloud to us
above the anvil-clangor of his footsteps: "Hoi-ho! Hoi-ho!"
The richness of his perfect
Heldentenor voice made the ringing of the anvils seem the
merest trill of violins. Only a few feet away from us he released the
mace-and-chain, which went spinning straight up over our heads and at the top
of its arc burst into fireworks, at which instant our visitor gripped my
forearm with his right hand. A gesture I would have reciprocated, except that
the casing of leather and iron about his massive wrist was too thick to afford
me any sort of purchase. With his free hand he doffed the iron helmet and
peering up (for as we stood, toe to toe, my eyes were at the level of the
Medusa graven on his breastplate) I could behold the blond hair and blue eyes
of Wagner's Siegfried.
"Hi there!" I said friendlily. Darling, Julie echoed my greeting, while Petite,
ever the show-off, tried to execute another pirouette under
1.05 gravity and fell on her inevitable ass.
"I am St. Bernard of Titan," the
visitor said, rending the air. "All just and godly men are my friends, but
villains tremble at my name."
"I'm
glad to hear it. My name is White Fang, and this is my wife—Darling, Julie, and
that at your feet is our daughter Petite. We all bid you welcome to Swan Lake,
St. Bernard."
Now
a softer music filled the air (the Venusburg music from Tdnnhauser, I believe) and St. Bernard, turning to face
the arch, lowered himself reverently to one knee. A sliimmering golden fight
formed in the center of the arch, and within this lambency, like a diamond set
in a gold chalice, appeared a woman of beauty to rival the gods'.
My
mother.
"Motherlove!" I exclaimed. "That is to say—Cleal What a
surprise!"
"Yes,
isn't it? How long has it been now? Thirteen years?
Fourteen? You're not even a puppy any more—and who is this?" (It was Petite, who was shyly bent double and
peering at Clea through the archway of her legs.) "Am I a grandmother! Fancy that! You'd never know by looking at me, would you? I still look as young as on the day your father first met me."
Though
this was true, the years had not been without their effect in other ways.
Certain tics of character had reached a mature growth, chiefly an unawareness
of other people that bordered on autism. Thus, she breezed right on with her
soliloquy, oblivious of my attempts to introduce Julie to her.
"And speaking of your father, I assume you've already met
my new companion?" By the solicitous manner in
which she laid her hand on St. Bernard's leathern thigh, she robbed that
'companion' of whatever sense it might have had of the euphemistic. "It
was he who insisted that we stop by at Swan Lake. I was reluctant, since it is
hardly a major
attraction. Nothing on the order of Titan, which
is positively another Bayreuth! You may be interested to know that St.
Bernard is our leading
Titanic tenor. You've no
doubt heard of his Lohengrin, and as for The Ring. . . ."
"Actually,
Clea," I broke in determinedly, "we're not such great Wagner fanciers
here, you know. Our Master inclines more to the French and Russian end of the spect. . . ."
"As
I was saying, St. Bernard said we had to stop by, so he could meet you and Pluto—Pluto is somewhere about too,
no?—because, you see, St. Bernard happens to be your brother."
"But—Motherlove
. . . isn't that rather . . . ? I mean, if he's my brother, then isn't this a matter of—if you'll excuse
the expression—inbreeding?"
St.
Bernard's hand reached for the battleaxe hanging at his side, but Clea stopped
him.
"Nonsense,
White Fang! He bears no relation to me whatever.
Shame on you, for making such a suggestion! You know your father sired several hundred children. St. Bernard was his son by
Sieglinde of Titan years
before I ever met Tennyson
White. I suppose, if you want to pick nits, you could say that St. Bernard is
your haZ/-brother. But he's no more related to me than his father was—or, rather, that is his relation precisely."
I
made a slight bow in acknowledgment of this unexpected bond, but St. Bernard,
not content with small gestures, came gallumphing forward to clasp me in a
half-brotherly, titanic embrace, which I sidestepped by sitting down quickly
at the console. "A feast!" I declared.
"This definitely calls for feasting and song."
I vanished the arch and dialed for an Anglo-Saxon Banquet
Hall, moderately stylized, with an Automatic Tumbler. Julie quickly whisked
herself into a few yards of brocade and a high-peaked hat, and I got into
something suitable in cloth-of-gold. Pluto was called for and arrived in short
order in a cardinal's gowns. St. Bernard, a true and reverent knight, had to
get back down on one knee to kiss the cardinal's ring.
"Mead!" I shouted to the robots in attendance (all
done up, appropriately, in fustian). "Roast boar! Venison! Hecatomb of
roast beef I"
"Hecatombs is anachronistic, Cuddles," Julie
advised.
"Well
then, if you're such a hot-shot Medievalist, you order!" Which she did—and in Old High German at
that. As she told me later, though, our Master helped with irregular
verbs. When she finished, Petite added her own postscriptive request in English
for butter brickie ice cream.
While
we sipped before-dinner meads, the Automatic Tumbler tumbled and a Robo-Jester
came around to the table and made deliciously bad jokes, which St. Bernard
seemed to think as jolly as they had been on opening night a thousand years
ago. Maybe it was the mead. Alcohol-wise the stuff was perfectly innocuous, but
our Masters supplied through our Leashes the exact degree of inebriation that
each of us was aiming at. Clea filled us in on her missing thirteen years (and
they were just about what one would suppose they'd been, judging by their
effect on her: the style of Titan—Clea's style—was very Wagnerian, very passionate,
and very, very big); then Pluto gave an account of our neglect
and redemption, which I don't think Clea heard because St. Bernard was tickling
her all the while. After the fish course, some partridges, and a suckling pig
with truffles, Clea and St. Bernard sang the second act of Tristan und Isolde for our benefit. Julie, to escape listening
to it, went blotto on her Leash.
This done, and much mead later, St. Bernard
proposed to give an exhibition of his skill at axe-throwing. They have this
whole Middle Ages bit on Titan. We upended the oaken
dining table and painted a human figure on it as a target. St. Bernard insisted
that we make wagers against him. I did have my doubts as to how well he would
do, since he was having difficulties just remaining upright at that point—but
every axe sank into the wood right where he told it to. Petite was clamorous
with admiration.
"Hoi-ho, Maedchen! Does the sport please you?" St. Bernard
lifted Petite to his shoulder. "Would you like to join it?" She
nodded, smiling, eyes aglow.
"Now, see here, St. Bernard—enough's
enough! If you're getting delusions of singing William Tell, I can assure you it isn't in my daughter's
repertoire."
"Oh,
let him have his way, or he'll get into a pet," Clea advised.
"It's
exactly because I'm afraid he shall get into a pet—with that axe of his—that I
worry. If you have so much confidence in him, Motherlove, why don't you let
him use you as a target?"
"I
have, many times. It's terribly dull. I mean, you just stand there. I wish you
hadn't gotten him so loaded. He always gets this way when he's had more than he
can handle. Next he'll be sentimental. I hate that!"
St.
Bernard, meanwhile, had posed Petite before the dining table and gone back
twenty paces to take aim. The blade of the ax he was using was fully a third of
the total length of my daughter.
"Stop,
madman!" I screamed, but too late—already the ax was hurtling at Petite,
seeming to wobble as it turned end over end about its center of gravity. I
rushed forward, as though to catch it in flight. . . .
There
now, good fellow, be comforted! Your Master is watching and he won't let
anything ill betide. Calmly, calm-
ly.
If I
had not had so much mead myself, I would not have needed the Leash's reminder.
For what could there ever be to worry about at Swan Lake with my Master ever
watching over me?
When St. Bernard had finished his
demonstration to Petite's and his own immense
satisfaction, I stepped up to the board and pulled out the axes.
"Now," I said airily, "let me show you how we throw axes at Swan
Lake. Julie, step up here!"
Julie,
who had been sailing through heaven at the end of her Leash until this moment,
came to with a start of real fear. "Cuddles, are you out of your mind? I will not!" But quickly her features assumed a milder expression,
and I knew that our Master had whispered his reassurances to her. She took her
place before the target.
I opened my demonstration with an ax that
sliced neatly between Julie's legs, rending the thick brocade of her gown. Then
I threw one underhand that snapped off the peak of her cap. Then several
perfect throws as I stood with my back turned to Julie. St. Bernard gasped at
the daring of the feat. I concluded my show of skill by spinning an axe not end
over end but sideways,
rotating about the shaft like a top.
I bowed to St. Bernard's thunderous applause.
"Thank you," I said, as much for my Master's assistance as for St.
Bernard's applause.
"But
you are wonderfull
You are a geniusl Now I am proud that you are my
brother. Come, we must make it a solemn union—we must swear eternal brotherhood
in blood. Blutbruderschaft!" With
these words St. Bernard removed the leathern bracelet binding his right wrist
and sliced across the exposed flesh with a jeweled dagger. "Now you,"
he said, handing me the bloody instrument. "We will mix our blood, and
then to the end of time. . . ."
St.
Bernard was interrupted by my rather copious heav-ings (it had been a large
feast), which I regret to say was the only thing I contributed to be mixed with
his blood. I remember only his first oaths ("Wotan! Fricka!"
etc.), for as soon as
my stomach was emptied out I fainted dead away.
When
I woke, I found myself moving through outer space. Pluto had been land enough
to explain to St. Bernard my peculiar infirmity (though failing to mention his
own part in that story), and St. Bernard had insisted, as a sort of reparation,
that we all accompany himself and Clea on their trip to Earth. Pluto and Julie
had demurred, for they were even less inclined to the Wagnerian than I, but our
Master, surprisingly, had overridden them. So we had set forth, the eight of us
(six pets, two Masters) immediately, and in no time at all we were on Earth.
The morning sun was glittering with immoderate
intensity on the waters of Lake Superior, and there again in the middle
distance was the cathedral tower of St. John the Divine.
Can
it be that I shall never again enjoy the easy pleasures of that time? That I
shall never, never again see Swan Lake and fly about among the familiar
asteroids? And can it be that this exile has been my free choicel O ye Heavens,
when I remember you—as I do now—too clearly, too dearly, all the force of my
will melts away and I long only to be returned to you. Nothing, nothing on
Earth can rival, and very little has the power even to
suggest, the illimitable resources of the Master's pleasure domes. Oh, nothing!
It was paradise—and it is. quite, quite gone.
CHAPTER
5:
In which the worst happens.
As soon as her feet touched Earth, Darling, Julie fell
into one of her sentimental moods and begged our Master to take us out to the
Skunk farm, where she had first met me. I seconded her request, less from
sentiment than out of a need to escape the presence of St. Bernard (who had
somehow got hold of the notion that he was in the neighborhood of the Black
Forest). Our Master, as usual, indulged our whim.
While
Petite ran off to explore the dark wood (which was in its way every bit as
realistic as anything one could produce on the console), Julie and I sat in
the lightest of Leashes and marveled at the changes time had wrought not only
in ourselves (for we had, after all, passed from puppyhood to maturity in the
meantime, and the gleeful shouts of our own dear pup were ringing in our ears)
but also in the scene about us. The roof of the barn had fallen in, and in the
orchard and surrounding meadows, saplings had taken root and were flourishing.
Julie gloried in all this decay, just as the young ladies of the 18th Century
must have gloried in the built-to-order ruins of the Gothic Revival. So great
was her passion for returning to the past that she begged our Master to be
unleashed!
"Please!"
she whined. "Just this once. I feel so aloof, so
anachronistic, out here in a Leash. I want to see what wilderness tastes
like."
Our Master pretended to
ignore her.
"Pretty
please," she whined more loudly, though it had become more of a bark by
now.
A
voice in my head (and in Julie's too, of course) soothed: There, now, gently. What's this, my darlings,
my dears, my very own pets? Why should you wish to throw off your nice Leashes?
Why, you're hardly Leashed at aUl Do you want to turn
into Dingoes?
"Yes!"
Julie replied. "Just for this one afternoon I want to be a Dingo."
I
was shocked. Yet I must admit that at the same time I was a little excited. It
had been so long since I had been without a Leash, that
so primitive an idea appealed to me. There is always a certain morbid pleasure
in putting on the uniform of one's enemy, of becoming, as it were, a double-agent.
If I
unleash you, there's no way for you to call me back. You'll just have to wait
till I come back for you.
"That's
all right," Julie assured him. "We won't set foot off the farm."
I'll return in the morning,
little one. Wait for me.
"Oh, we will, we
will," Julie and I promised antiphonally.
"Me
too," Petite demanded, having returned from her explorations, prompt to
her Master's bidding.
And
then he was gone, and our minds slipped from their Leashes and into such a
tumble and whirlwind of thought that none of us could speak for several
minutes. Leashed, one can keep more thoughts simultaneously before consciousness,
and with the Leash off, we had to leam to think more slowly than in linear
sequence.
A
more vivid pink flushed Julie's cheek, and her eyes were sparkling with a
sudden, unaccustomed brilliance. I realized that this was probably the first
time in her life as a pet—in her whole life, that is—that she had been entirely
off her Leash. She was probably feeling tipsy. I was, and I was no stranger to
the experience.
"Hello,
Earthling," she said. Her voice seemed different, sharper and quicker. She
plucked an apple from the branches overhead and polished it on her velvety
skin.
"You
shouldn't eat that, if you recall," I warned. "There may be
germs."
"I
know." She bit into it, then, repressing her laughter, offered the rest of
the apple to me. It was rather an obvious literary reference, but I could see
no reason to refuse the apple on that account.
I
took a large bite out of it. When I saw the other half of the worm that
remained in the apple, I brought our little morality play to an abrupt
conclusion. It was Julie who found the old pump and got it working. The
wellwater had a distinctly rusty flavor, but it was at least preferable to the
taste lingering in my mouth. Then, with my head in Julie's lap and her fingers
tousling my hair, I went to sleep, though it was the middle of the day.
When
I woke the heat of the afternoon sun was touching me at every pore, and I was
damp with sweat. The wind made an irregular sound
in the trees around us, and from the branches overhead, a crow cried hoarsely
and took to the air. I watched its clumsy trajectory with an amusement somehow
tinged with uneasiness. This
was what it was like to be
mortal.
"We're
getting sunburnt," Julie observed placidly. "I think we should go
into the house."
"That
would be trespassing," I pointed out, recalling how Roxanna had laid the
house under her interdict.
"So
much the better," said Julie, for whom the romance of being a Dingo for a
day had not yet worn off.
In
the farmhouse, dusty strands of adhesive—cobwebs-hung from ceilings, and the
creaking floor was littered with paper that time had peeled from the walls. In
one of the upstairs rooms, Julie found closets and drawers of mildewed
clothing, including some cotton dresses that would have been the right size for
a ten-year-old. It was hard to think of Roxanna ever being that small—or that
poor. I felt vaguely guilty to have opened up this window on her past, and when
one of the dresses, rotten with age, came apart in my hands, a little spooky
too. I took Julie into another of the upstairs rooms, which contained a broad,
cushioned apparatus, raised about a yard off the floor. The cushion smelled
awfully.
"Cuddles,
look—a bedl A real onel Why, an antique like this
would be worth a fortune in the asteroids."
"I
suppose so," I replied. "If they could get the
smell out of it."
"Beds must decay—like
clothing."
I
sat down on the edge of the bed, and it bounced with a creaking, metallic
sound, much like the sound made by the pump outside. Julie laughed and jumped
onto the bed beside me. It groaned, and the groan deepened to a rasp, and the
rasp snapped. Julie went right on laughing as the bed collapsed to the floor.
Looking at her sprawled out beside me on that quaint apparatus, I became aware
of a feeling that I had never experienced before. For, though we had known each
other intimately for years, I had never felt quite this urgently desirous of
Julie. Undoubtedly this too was a consequence of being unleashed.
"Julie," I said,
"I'm going to bite you."
"Grrr," she
growled playfully.
"Arf," I replied.
"Me
too, me tool" Petite cried, bounding into the room. She very quickly found
herself outside again, digging a hole in the garden in which to bury her uncle
Pluto. Before the afternoon was passed, there were holes for Clea and St.
Bernard and the entire absentee Skunk family.
Julie is my Darling, Julie
is my Darling.
The
three of us spent the night in the farmhouse amid creakings and groanings of
old wood and ominous scuny-ings in the walls. Petite slept in a little crib
that must once have been Roxanna's. We were up with the sun and went,
shivering, directly out of doors to wait beneath the apple trees. We were cold
and we were hungry, and swarms of hostile, buzzing insects rose from the
dew-drenched grass to settle on our raw skins and feed on our blood. I killed
three or four, but the senseless things continued to attack us oblivious to
their danger. Even in the darkest ages of Shroeder, we pets had not been
subjected to such strenuous discomforts. I began to see the utilitarian value
of clothing and wished wistfully for my cloth-of-gold suit of yesterday's
feasting.
The
sun had risen nearly to noonday, when Julie finally turned to me and asked:
"What do you suppose is wrong, Cuddles?"
It
was useless by now to pretend that nothing was amiss, but I could only answer
her question with a look of dismay. Perhaps we were being punished for asking
to be unleashed. Perhaps, impossible as such a thought was, our Master had
forgotten us. Perhaps. . . .
But
how could a pet presume to interpret his Master's actions? Especially such
irresponsible, inconceivable, and thoughtless ways as leaving three pedigreed
pets—one the merest puppy—defenseless in an alien world among Dingoes!
When
our hunger grew extreme, we gorged on apples, cherries, and sour plums, not
even bothering to look for wormholes. Through that afternoon and into the night
we waited for our Master's return, until at last the chill and darkness of the
night forced us into the house.
The
next morning was spent in more useless waiting, though this time we had the
prudence to wear clothing-pants and jackets of rough blue cloth and rubberized
boots. Almost everything else had rotted beyond salvage. Our Master did not
return.
"Julie," I said at last (having
sent Petite off to pick blueberries so that she might be spared for as long as
possible the knowledge of her changed condition),
"we're on our own. Our Master has abandoned us. He doesn't want us any
more." Julie began to cry, not making much noise about it, but the tears
rolled down her cheeks in a steady stream faster than I could kiss them away.
But
for all that, I must confess that Julie adapted to our abandoned state more
readily than I. She enjoyed the challenges of that archaic, Dingo-like
existence. No doubt she was aided by her sense of make-believe. Every day while
I went to a high hill in the vicinity to call, hopelessly and to no apparent
effect, to our Master, Julie made believe to fix up the farmhouse. She cleared
the floors, dusted, washed, aired out the musty furniture and decaying
mattresses, and experimented with the interesting new vegetables that grew
among the weeds of a forgotten garden. (Carrots, by the bye, are very good
boiled in rusty water with a little dirt thrown in for seasoning.) After the
first week my visits to the hillside became less frequent. I was convinced
that our Master would never return to us. The thought of such cruelty and
indifference—after all those years at Swan Lake—passed quite beyond belief.
Helping
Julie at odd jobs around the farm, I began to have a certain respect for the
pre-Mastery technology of Earth. I discovered
and repaired one mechanism that was especially useful: a rough stone wheel
three feet in diameter and three inches thick that was set into rotary motion
by a foot pedal. By holding a piece of metal to the revolving wheel, the
machine could be made to give off sparks, and these in turn ignited dry scraps
of wood. The fire thus produced could be conserved in various ingenious engines
in the farmhouse. Fire has an immense utility, but since I assume my readers
are familiar with it, I will not make my digression any longer. I only mention
in passing that on the night of my discovery Julie, sitting by me in front of a
roaring log fire, looked at me with real admiration! A look that I returned—for she was very lovely in the firelight,
lovelier than she had ever been before, it seemed. The firelight softened the contours of her
face, until I was aware only of her relaxed, easy smile and the brightness of
her eyes, a brightness that did not need to borrow its brilliance from the fire
but seemed to issue from her very being.
"Prometheus," she whispered.
"My
own Pandora," I returned, and a scrap of old verse popped into my mind, at
once comforting and terrible in its implications. I recited it to Julie in a low
voice:
Your
courteous lights in vain you waste, Since Julianna here is come; For she my mind has so displaced, That I shall never find my
home.
Julie shivered theatrically.
"Cuddles," she said, "we've got to find our own way home."
"Don't
call me Cuddles," I said in, for me, a rough manner. "If you won't
call me White Fang, stick to Prometheus."
Day followed day with no sign of our Master's
return. The longer we stayed at the farm, the more inevitable discovery became.
On my trips to the hillside I had sometimes noticed clouds of dust rising from
the country roads, and, though I was careful to keep under cover and off the
roads, I knew that luck alone and merely luck had prevented our capture so far.
My imagination recoiled from what would become of us if were to fall into the
hands of Dingoes. I had only to behold my father's defaced monument (which I
passed by every day on the way to my hilltop) to be reminded of his terrible
fate, and it was not a memory to inspire confidence.
Therefore
I determined that Julie, Petite, and I must find our way to Shroeder Kennel on
foot, where, though we might not be so happy as we had
been in the asteroids, we would at least be secure. But I had no idea how to
get there. Years ago when we had driven with Roxanna to the Skunk farmhouse,
the robot-driver had taken a circuitous route, in a vaguely southwesterly
direction, which I had never troubled to learn. In any case, it was not wise to
walk along the roads.
I
renewed my treks through the nearby woods, searching for a vantage from which I
could see the cathedral tower or some other signpost back to civilization. At
last, a sign was given to me: a hill rose on the other side of a marsh; on the
crest of that hill was an electric powerlinel
Where
there was electricity there, surely, would be Masters.
In
1970 when the Masters had first manifested themselves to mankind, they had
insisted that they be given complete authority over all electric plants, dams,
dynamos, and radio and television stations. Without in any way interfering
with their utility from a human standpoint (indeed, they effected major
improvements), the Masters transformed this pre-existent network into a sort of
electromagnetic pleasure spa.
In
time, of course, their additions and refinements exceeded mere human need or
comprehension. What do the cows know of the Muzak playing in their dairybam, except
that it makes them feel good? Human labor could manufacture devices according
to the Masters' specification that human understanding would never be able to
fathom. But even human labor became obsolete as the Masters—in themselves, a virtually unlimited power supply—stayed on
and took things over, setting automatons to do the dirty work, freeing man from
the drudgery of the commonplace that had been his perennial complaint. Freeing,
at least, those who would accept such freedom—who would, in short, agree to
become pets.
Although
in many respects the Masters' innovations had superceded the primitive
technology of the 1970's, they still maintained (largely for the benefit of
ungrateful Dingoes) a modified system of electric power lines, lacing the
entire world in arcane geometrical patterns that only the Masters could
understand—or maintain.
It
was to these high-tension lines that the Masters came to bathe and exercise,
and so it was to the power lines that I would take my family. Even if there was
no way to reach the Masters as they flowed back and forth in the wires
overhead, we could follow the lines to some generator or powerhouse, perhaps
the one that adjoined Shroeder, perhaps another elsewhere, for kennels were
invariably located near power stations.
Once
we reached the power line, it would be safe journeying. No Dingo would dare
trespass into the very heart of the Masters' domain.
I rushed
to the farm jubilantly. Julie was drawing water at the pump. "Don't run
through the garden, Cuddles," she called to me. "We'll need those
tomatoes for the winter ahead."
"It
makes. . . .no difference. . . .any
more. . . .Darling, Julie!" I had run a long way, and breath came hard.
"I found
them! .... We can go now. . . .home
again, home again. . . .jiggety-jog!"
Stumbling
up to Julie I gave her a quick kiss and upended the bucket of water over my
head, shuddering deliciously. The cold water seemed to stun every nerve ending
into a happy numbness. It felt marvelous—almost like the Leash. Julie stood
dumbfounded. I kissed her again.
"You beast, you're
soaking wet!"
Clothing
does have its inconveniences, the chief of which (once
one is used to the discomfort) is absorbency.
"Julie,
I found them! I have. We're practically home already." And I explained
about the power line and what it meant.
Julie looked meditative. "Well, I guess
that means well have to leave the farm now?"
"Have to! Mastery, Julie, aren't you anxious to be away from here?"
"I don't know. It was coming to seem
like our own kennel. It was so nice, so private. And I haven't started to leam to cook. Do you know what Petite
brought home today? Eggs! We can. . . ."
"You want to stay in this wilderness
with Dingoes on all sides? Never to be Leashed again?
And in this archaic, stinking, ruinous, dirty, foul. . . ." Julie began to
cry piteously, and I relented, conscious that I had rather overstated the case.
"It would
have been every bit that
horrible without you. It was nice,
Julie, but only on your account. If we go back, I'm sure our Master will let
you continue learning to cook. And hell rig up a much better kitchen than you
have here. With an electric stove."
She brightened, and I pressed my point. "But you know we have to go back.
Our Leashes need us. If we stayed here, we'd become no better than
Dingoes."
"I suppose you're
right. I suppose."
"That's
the spiritl Now, how soon can we be ready? You fix
something to carry food in. Blankets would do, and at night we'll be able to
keep warm. And see if you can't find some shoes that will fit Petite. If we
start out early tomorrow, I don't expect we'll spend a night in the open, but
just in case...."
While
Julie improvised knapsacks, I went to the toolshed. There was an ancient weapon
there that circumstances had made me uniquely equipped (as it then seemed) to
handle—an ax. Not in the flaring Medieval style of St. Bernard's, but lethal
enough in its modest way to slice through any number of Dingoes. I found that
it was more difficult to throw the thing at 'a target than it had been at Swan
Lake, because the sharp edge of the wedge was as often as not facing in the
wrong direction at the moment of impact. However, wielding it by hand I was
able to break up armloads of kindling from the broken rafters of the bam. Take
that! And that! What ho! What havoc!
Grimly
I refined upon the murderous properties of my weapon. I had noticed that the
spark-producing machine would put a fine edge on metal that was held against it
at the proper angle. After patient experimentation, I had so sharpened the iron
blade that the merest touch of it would sliver flesh. Now, I thought, let the Dingoes come!
We
set off before noon. Though Petite, still believing it was all a game, was
amused and talkative, neither of her parents were in
such high spirits. Julie was wistful and melancholic at leaving the farm
(though she agreed we had no other choice), and I was nervous and apprehensive.
From the hill from which I had espied the power line, we struck out into a wood
of scrub pine, birch, and balsam. In the woods there was no way to estimate our
progress. The sun can be used as a compass and even, in a rough way, as a
clock, but it is no speedometer at all. We walked, and when it seemed that we
had walked twice, three times the distance to the power line, we kept on
walking. Julie became petulant; I became angry. Then she grew angry and I
sulked. But always while we were walking. The brush
caught at our pants' legs, and the mud at the edge of the marshes about which
we were forced to detour sucked at our boots. And we walked. Petite, riding
pigaback on my shoulders, was having a world of fun slapping the mosquitoes
that landed on my forehead. And still we walked.
The sun, striated by long, low, wispy clouds,
hung huge and crimson at the horizon behind us; before us a pale sliver of moon
peeped over the crest of a hill—and on the hill, black against the indigo of
the sky, stood the power line.
Julie
dropped her pack and ran up the hill. "Masters!" she cried.
"Masters, we've come! Leash us. Make us yours again. Bring us home."
The
power line stood stark and immobile, wires swaying gently in the breeze. Julie
embraced the wooden pole and screamed at the unhealing wires: "Master,
your pets have come back to you. We love you! MASTER!"
"They
don't hear you," I said softly. "If they could hear you, they would
come."
Julie
stood up, squaring her shoulders bravely, and joined me where I had remained at
the foot of the hill. There were no tears in her eyes. But her lips were
pressed together in a mirthless, unbecoming smile. "I hate them," she
pronounced clearly. "With my whole being, I hate them!" Then she fell into my arms in a dead faint.
Petite
stayed awake to keep me company through the early hours of the evening. We
listened to the nightsounds of animals and birds and tried to guess what they
all were. At about nine o'clock by the moon, a complete and utter silence
enveloped the land.
"Now that's strange," I observed.
"What's strange, Papa?"
"That
when the crickets are quiet, there's no sound at all. Not a scrap. Aren't wires
supposed to hum?
To
make some small noise? These don't. I think they may be dead."
"Dead?" echoed Petite. "Are the Masters dead? Will the Dingoes
eat us now? Will they let me go to the bathroom first? Because when I get
scared. . . ."
"No,
Pete sweet. The wires
are dead, not the Masters.
The Masters will never die. Don't you remember what I told you the other day
about God?"
"But that was God."
"Same difference, darling. Now you go to sleep. Your Papa was just
thinking aloud and your Mommy was only pretending to be afraid. You know Mommy
likes to pretend."
"But
why didn't God come down from the electric poles when Mommy asked?"
"Maybe
this line isn't in use, honey. Maybe it's broken. Tomorrow we're going to walk
down the fine and find out. Anyhow I was probably wrong about the noise. That
could be just a supersiriton that wires hum, and only Dingoes are
superstitious. The Masters probably can't hear us through all the insulation on
the wires. What would they be listening for way out here, anyhow? We'll find
our way to a nice kennel tomorrow, Petite, don't you worry."
Petite
fell asleep then, but I could not. Great shafts of light streamed form the
northern horizon. They glowed whitely in the black sky, dimming the stars as
they shot out, dissolved, reformed.
The Northern Lights. Aurora Borealis.
It
was there especially that the Masters loved to play and relax. They felt at
home among the electrons of the Van Allen belt, and where it curved in to touch
the Earth's atmosphere at the magnetic poles they followed it, controlling the
ionization of the air, structuring those pillars of light that men have always
wondered at to conform to the elaborate rules of their supravisual geometry.
These shifting patterns were the supreme delight of the Masters, and it was precisely
because Earth, of all the planets in the solar system, possessed the strongest
Van Allen belt that they had originally been drawn to this planet. They had
only bothered to concern themselves with mankind after a number of nuclear
explosions had been set off in the Van Allen belt in the 1960*s.
The
aurora that night was incredibly beautiful, and so I knew that the Masters were still on Earth,
living and flaming for their pets—their poor, lost maltreated pets—to see.
But
it was a cold flame and very remote. I drew small comfort from it.
"Your
courteous lights in vain you waste," I muttered.
Julie,
who has always been a light sleeper, stirred. "I'm sorry," she
mumbled, probably too sleepy still to remember why she was supposed to be
sorry.
"It's
all right. Well find them tomorrow," I said, "and tomorrow and
tomorrow." Julie smiled and slid by imperceptible degrees back into
sleep.
The
next day we followed the lines to the north. They ran along beside an old
asphalt road, scarred with fissures and upheavals, but still easier to travel
than the rank brush on either side. We moved slower since I had found that my
knees would no longer support the double burden of a knapsack and Petite, and
we were obliged to match our pace against hers.
A faded sign gave the distance to Shroeder as
twelve miles. Using the road (for the wires overhead were sufficient protection,
as we thought, against the Dingoes), we could hope to reach the kennel by
midafternoon. Regularly we passed deserted farmhouses set hack from the road
and, twice, the road widened and the ruins of houses were set closer together:
a town. Here the wires would branch off in all directions, but the main power
line followed its single course toward Shroeder. The poles were of rough pine,
stained to reddish-brown by creosote, one just like another, until. . . .
Julie noticed it as we were on the outskirts
of Shroeder. Running up and down the poles were thin silvery lines that glinted
metallically in the sunlight. On closer inspection these lines could be seen to
form vertical chains of decorative elements in simple, repeating patterns. One
common design consisted of overlapping circles linked in series by straight
lines, so:
Another was a single zigzag pattern:
The most frequent design resembled a
circuiting diagram of dry cells in series:
In fact they were all circuiting diagrams.
It
was too crude decoratively and such nonsense from any other viewpoint that I
knew it could not be the work of the Masters. There was something barbaric
about these markings that smelt of Dingoes I
But what Dingo would dare approach this near
the sanctuary of the Masters? The Kennel must be only a few hundred yards
off. I began to have misgivings about our security. Before I could properly
begin to savor this danger, another, and graver, had presented itself.
"Cuddles
I" Julie screamed. "Gods and Masters, look!
The power station!"
I scooped up Petite and was at Julie's side
instantly. A cyclone fence that ran some hundred feet along the road prevented
our entrance to the power station, but it made no difference, for it was
nothing but a rubble heap now. I-beams, gnarled and
twisted like the limbs of denuded oaks, shown in gruesome silhouette against
the light blue of the summer sky. The pylons that had fed the high tension
wires into the substation lay on the ground like metal Goliaths, quite dead.
The wires that had led out from the station had been snapped and hung inert
from the top of the cyclone fence, where now and again a breeze would stir
them. All, all defunct.
"It's been bombed," I said, "and that's impossible." "The Dingoes?" Petite asked. T daresay. But how could they?"
It
made no sense. So primitive an attack as this could not
succeed against the Mastery when the whole rich arsenal of twentieth-century
science had failed. Oh, the nuclear blasts in the Van Allen belt had annoyed them, but I doubted then and I doubt now
whether man has it in his power actually to kill one of the Masters.
How
could it be done? How do you fight something without dimensions, without even
known equations that might give some symbolic approximation of their character?
Not, surely, by bombing minor power stations here and there;
not even by bombing all of them. As well hope to kill a lion with a
thistle. The Masters transcended mere technology.
Inside
the fence, from somewhere in the tangle of gutted machinery, there was a moan.
A woman's voice reiterated the single word: "Masters, Masters. . . ."
"That's
no Dingo," Julie said. "Some poor pet is caught in there. Cuddles, do
you realize this means all the pets have been abandoned?"
"Hushl You'll only make Petite cry with
talk like that."
We
made our way through a hole in the fence sheared open by a falling pylon.
Kneeling a few feet from that hole, her face turned away from us, was the
moaning woman. She was using the blasted crossbeam of the pylon as a sort of prie-dieu. Her hair, though tangled and dirty, still
showed traces of domestication. She was decently naked, but her flesh was
discolored by bruises and her legs were badly scratched. Confronted with this
pathetic ruin of a once-handsome pet, I realized for the first time how
terribly wild
Julie looked: dressed in
the most vulgar clothes, her hair wound up in a practical but inartistic bun
and knotted with strips of cloth, her lovely feet encased in clumsy rubber
boots. We must have looked like Dingoes.
The
poor woman stopped moaning and turned to confront us. By slow degrees her
expression changed from despair to blank amazement. "Father!" she
said, aghast.
"Roxanna!" I exclaimed. "Is it you?"
CHAPTER 6:
In
which I defend a woman's honor, and with what dire consequence.
It was nobody else. She was rather thinner now than she had
been; time had encroached upon her beauty to that degree that one could not,
with the best will in the world, mistake her for eighteen—or even for
twenty-eight. But her nose and her glance and her intelligence—these were still
as sharp as they had ever been. No doubt of it, this was Roxanna Proust, née Skunk.
Roxanna,
for her part, was not as readily convinced that, quite contrary to being her
father, I was only her little White Fang, her former disciple, grown now to a
man's estate.
"But those clothes . . ." she
insisted. "I'd know that jacket anywhere, with the missing bottom button.
And those boots with the red circles around the rim. And a
week's growth of beard. It's my father to the life!"
Out
of courtesy I removed my jacket, but I was reluctant to remove my pants for some
reason. Perhaps clothes are the cause of modesty, rather than, as Genesis would
have it, the other way around. Briefly as I could, I explained to Roxanna how
our Master had brought us to the farm and there deserted us, and how we had to
take clothes from the farmhouse to make our journey—her parents' clothes, as it
happened.
"And
Pluto and your mother—you say they came with you?" Roxanna asked, scrunching up those shrewd wrinkles of hers mquiringly.
"Where are they
now?"
"I was hoping you might know, Roxanna. I thought Pluto might have seen fit to pay you a
visit. I know that he sends you each new book he does."
"No.
No, it must not have occurred to him. This is the first I've head of your being
here. But what"— her expression underwent a subde change, as though she
had begun to make calculations—"a delightful surprise it is I"
Here the conversation lapsed awkwardly, for
Julie and I did not wish to show ourselves boorishly concerned only with our
own problems when Roxanna herself was in such evident distress, and Roxanna for
her part seemed to be occupied with some private debate.
"Have
you read The
Prayers for Investments?" Julie asked after this embarrassing silence. "All Swan Lake is
certain it's Pluto's best thing to date. They say his new ceremonies are
absolutely compulsive."
"I started it, but I couldn't seem to .
. . make much sense of it. So often, I find that . . . these modem writers, as
I've observed . . . although Proust, however. . . ." She trailed off
vaguely and began absent-mindedly to rub her bony, bare thighs. I noticed that
her skin was covered with small black-and-blue marks, chiefly on her thighs and
lower torso. The marks were too tiny to have resulted from blows, too numerous
to be accidental.
She sighed deeply, a sign expressive of more
than the
grinding ennui of life at Shroeder, of more than even the loss
of her Master. It was an inexpressibly sad sound, yet at
the same time perversely pleasurable. "The brute I" she whis-
pered, not for our ears. "The filthy, f-------- brute!"
Then,
as though this had all occurred in one mighty parenthesis, she returned to her
earlier theme. "If the truth be known, I read much less of late than once
I did. Even Proust, even he, doesn't have the same—whatever it was he did have.
No, not even Proust. . . ." This speech, too, died away in a whisper, so
that by the end it was not quite certain whether the last word was Proust or a repetition of the brute. "And
then, of course, there's been this revolution.
And
it's hard to concentrate on reading, with a revolution going on all about
one."
"Ah
yes," I said, "the revolution. Would you tell us something about
that?"
Roxanna's
account was none too clear, having been assembled from eavesdropped
conversations and uninformed conjectures. Even the word revolution proved to be misleading. Further, her whole
account was interlarded with such a quantity of sighs and imprecations, laments
and curses, that a full transcription would be an excess of verisimilitude.
Therefore, I've written here not the garbled story Roxanna told us that
afternoon but the facts as they were later to be established by the courts and
newspapers.
July
had been a month of unusual sunspot activity. The Masters, anticipating the
dynamic auroral displays that follow such periods, had flocked to Earth—many,
like our Master, bringing their pets with them. Shortly after our arrival,
during the afternoon that Julie and I had been unleashed,
a solar prominence of extraordinary intensity had erupted from the center of a
sunspot cluster and knocked the Masters out of commission.
It
was like a house that's been totally electrified. Everything was plugged in:
the refrigerators, the stove, the air conditioner, the iron, the toaster, the
coffeepot, the floodlights, the television, and the model railroad in the basement.
When BLAT! lightning strikes, and there's one hell of
a short-circuit. Lights out, tubes popped, wires fused, motors dead. The
Masters weren't dead, of course. They're made of stronger stuff than toasters.
But while they convalesced
Roxanna
herself had been spared the worst of it, since she'd been sitting on the
cathedral steps when the lights went out. But she'd seen it happen. In a flash
(literally, a flash) the entire kennel—walls, floors, even the stores of food
and sporting equipment—had disappeared. It was as though they had existed only
as an idea in the mind of God, and then God had gone off and forgotten that
idea. Pets who had been soaring along slipstreams in
the vast spaces of the gymnasium soared now in vaster spaces. Everyone who had
been in the upper floors of the kennel buildings suddenly found himself
plunging down to the ground, overpowered by Earth's gravity, accelerating. For
the fortunate, like Rox-anna, it had meant only a sore behind or a sprained ankle. Others died.
The
carnage had been terrible. The Shroeder KenneL what was left of it, was thrown into panic. But the worst was still before
them. The Dingoes, quicker to realize what had happened than the distracted
pets, had overrun the breeding farms and kennels everywhere. In the first fire
of insurrectionary excitement, they were ruthless. Puppies were taken from
their mothers, to be raised in the dens of Dingoes; the men, any who resisted,
were ruthlessly slaughtered before the eyes of their mates, and the poor bitches.
. . . Well, what would one expect of Dingoes?
At
this point Roxanna broke into tears, quite unable to carry on with even the
semblance of a chronology. "Oh, the brute!" she
wailed. "Oh, you've no idea how I hate him!
When he saw me that night, he had two of his minions take me to his tent, and
then—it was so awful! The things I was forced to do! The abasement! Oh, I could
poison him! The brute! But he doesn't give me a
chance. Oh, when I think ... If you
only knew. . . ." As this diatribe continued, Rox-anna's
hands rubbed ever more frenziedly across the scant flesh of her thighs, dark
with a multitude of those curious pinpoint bruises. "Remember, when I told
you, years and years ago, about my parents? How my father would go into town on
Saturday night and return all tanked up? The beatings he gave my poor mother?
How I would listen at the register upstairs? How I wanted to see them! But now I know! Because he's
just the same. Another brute. A vicious, ignorant, smelling, loutish brute!"
All in all, it took Roxanna the better part
of an hour to tell this story, for she had a way of breaking into passionate
denunciations or veering off into a digression that would have been the delight
of any admirer of Tristram
Shandy. For
my own part, I am inclined to be more straightforward. In fact, her divagations
began to distress me considerably as soon as I realized that the vicinity was
still swarming with armed Dingoes, and that Roxanna was living at Shroeder in
bondage to the chief of them, Bruno Schwarzkopf I
"Roxanna,"
I said, trying to raise her to her feet, "Julie and I are going to help
you escape from him. We'll take you back to the farm. No
one will look there. But we'd better start right away. We've wasted too much
time sitting about and talking to no purpose."
"It's
too late," Roxanna said with a sigh
in which the resignation was not unmixed with a certain
self-satisfaction. "It's already too late."
Too
long allegiance to the authority of Proust had finally taken its toll on
Roxanna's character, and though I may anticipate my story by mentioning the
word here, I should like to say it this once and have done: Roxanna, sadly, was
something of a masochist.
"Roxanna,"
I said, more firmly now, "you must come
with us."
"Get your own bitch, Mister," came a good-natured bellow of a voice from not too
far away. With a sinking heart I faced the intruder, a red-faced, bow-legged,
asymetrical knot of flesh in khakis crusted with mud and grease. He stood on
the other side of the fence, arms akimbo, exposing several ill-formed,
decay-blackened teeth in the sort of grin I have since been told is
'well-meaning.' Though not much more than five feet tall, his
chest and arms seemed thick almost to deformity. He held what looked
like a glass fishing rod in one meaty hand.
"The name's Schwarzkopf, Mister. Bruno Schwarzkopf, and I'm the head of the RIC in these parts.
We're repatriating these damned pets. Now, come on home, Rocky old girl. You
know what I told you about sniffing up to other dogs." He laughed, rather
the way a bull would laugh, if bulls laughed.
So
this was a Dingo! This wretched, misformed runt. All
these years of dread—and now at the moment of confrontation it was nothing
much worse than a genetic prank. I allowed
my just wrath to swell luxuriously. "You are not Roxanna's Master, and she
is not going with you."
"The hell you say!"
"Please,"
Roxanna implored. "I must go to him now." But her body didn't
protest; she was limp with fear. I pushed her behind me and picked up my axe
from the ground. That
should send him running, I
thought confidently.
His
smiled broadened. "What's with you, pal? Are you some kind of goddamned
pet? Or what?"
"Dingo!" I said, eloquent with contempt. "Defend yourself!"
Bruno reached a hand behind his back and made
adjustments on an apparatus strapped there. It was the size of one of our
knapsacks. Then he climbed through the hole in the fence, brandishing the long,
flexible pole.
"Axes!"
he scoffed. "The next thing you know, someone's going to invent the bow
and arrow."
I
advanced toward the Dingo, who stood within the fence now, my ax at the ready
and murder in my heart, as they say. With my left hand I held to the metal
frame of the fallen pylon, using it as a crutch. My knees were very weak, which
I am told is not unusual in such circumstances.
Bruno flicked the end of the glass fishing
rod against the pylon. There was a spark, and my mind reeled.
I
was sitting on the ground. I could see Bruno's. black-toothed
grin above me between white flashes of unconsciousness. I swung at his face
wildly. The axe hit the pylon with a dull thunk.
He flicked the pole at me again. It touched
my left leg at the knee. The shock tore through my body and wrenched a cry from
my lips.
"Good stuff, huh, Jack? Great for the circulation. If you're interested in
mechanical things, it's real easy to make. It's a prod pole. Prod poles are
meant for cattle, but they work even better on smaller animals."
He flicked it again, tracing a line of pain
across my neck. I screamed in agony—I couldn't help it.
"The fishpole was my idea. Handles easier this way."
He
let the tip of the pole play over my right arm. Every shred of consciousness
that remained to me was in my hand. I clenched the axe handle until the pain in
my hand was worse than the flashes of pain that tore through my whole
body—until there was no consciousness left.
When
I woke—seconds later? minutes? I don't know—I could
hear Roxanna's hysterical laughter. Bruno had finished with her. Julie's voice,
pitched so high that I could hardly recognize it, was saying Stay away] and then, still more shrilly, Stay away from my daughter!
There
was a sparking sound, and Petite's scream. "White
Fang!" Julie called. "Oh, Mastery—White Fang!"
She
had called me that!
Not Cuddles, not
Prometheus. But White Fang!
I
sprang to my feet, and the ax was just part of my hand now. I felt, as never
before, even when I was Leashed, totally alive and aware, absolutely sure of
myself. My body was a living flame. Wow!
Bruno had ceased to torment Petite and had
caught hold of Julie. He heard me scrambling over the wreckage of the station
and turned around just in time for the axe to come crashing down across his
chest.
I
hadn't meant to draw blood. I didn't dare to. I had only wanted to smash the
power pack strapped on his back.
There
was a terrible gush of blood from the chest wound, thick and winy. The axe in
my hand was covered with blood. It was horrible. I had never seen anyone
bleeding like this before, never. It was a hundredfold worse than the injuries
I'd done Pluto or St. Bernard.
It was horrible! The blood.
Convulsed
with vomiting, I collapsed onto Bruno's fallen body. The last thing I remember
was Roxanna's tear-streaked face as she rushed forward to take the fallen Dingo
in her arms.
In these days of P(BLAT)eril
and P(BLAT)ossibility. . . . Whenever the speaker enunciated a P, the
public address system erupted into a horrible crepitant noise: P(BLAT)I
The crowd roared.
Hands
tied, feet bound, I wiggled up in the back seat for a better view. We were
moving down a city street at no more than five miles per hour through such a
concentration of Dingoes that my immediate response was to wish myself
unconscious again, the smell was so terrific.
Yes-
P(BLAT(ossibility! Another oP(BLAT)ortunity
to hoP(BLAT)e once more—for the Inductance Corps! P(BLAT)
rovidence has ordained it, and. . ..
The
speaker's voice (which issued from a metal horn on the hood of the jeep) was
drowned by the swelling anthem that the swarm of Dingoes about us raised and
that the resonating masses further along the parade route caught up and
amplified:
Diodel
Triodel Highest Cathode!
Charge our hearts with a hundred ampsl
Guard our ohms and fight our camps
With the burning of your lamps I
As we chant this ode
To Victory,
Be thou still our goad
To Victory!
Guide us on the road
To Victory!
Hurray!
Though
Julie was in the back seat with me, an armed Dingo sat between us and
discouraged our conversation with little pokes of his rifle butt. I was able to
pantomime the question that concerned me most: "Petite?" But Julie
could only give an anguished shrug and shake her head in reply.
"Where
are we going?" I asked the Dingo guard. He answered with his rifle butt
against my lower ribs. "Where are we now?" The rifle butt seemed not
to know. I retired into a philosophic silence.
At
the end of the anthem the loudspeaker renewed its own patriotic cacaphony: But we must grasp this oP(BLAT)or-tunity!
Only B(BLAT)lood and sweat and toil and tears can
P(BLAT)ay the P(BLAT)rice that history demands of us. . . .
A
woman rushed from the frenzied crowd through which the jeep was bulldozing its
way. She threw a bouquet into my face and followed it as well as she could with
herself. "Give 'em hell, boy!" she shouted between kisses. "Give
'em hell!" she was was still screaming as the men in khaki were dragging
her away. I had the distinct feeling that had she known me for what I was—a
pet—she would have been less friendly, though perhaps no less demonstrative.
Fortunately, the driver of the jeep, a Major of the so-called Inductance Corps,
had had the foresight to wrap me in his overcoat, which offered almost as
effective protection as invisibility.
The
parade terminated at a makeshift airport, once a city park, where a Ford
Trimotor was warming its engines at the end of a rough gravel runway. As our
jeep pulled up to the plane, we could see a stretcher being loaded into the
cabin under Roxanna's fretful supervision.
"You
brute!" she called out above the hiccoughing of the plane's motors, as
soon as she caught sight of me. When Bruno was stowed aboard and we were being
led on at gunpoint, Roxanna developed her theme with more imagination. "Axe-murderer! Fiend! Judas! They've got your number
now, boy! They'll take care of you! I only wish I could do it with my own two
hands. But I did what I could—I told them who you
were—who your father was. Tennyson White! You should have seen the faces they
made! And now they're going to do for you what they did for him—and for the
Man-glesnatch statue. Ha!" The driver of the jeep began pulling her back.
"Send me his ear, officer. And hers too. And
their bones: I'll grind their bones to make my bread!"
When
we were at last safely (so to speak) aboard the plane and the hatch was closed,
the guard assured us it would be nothing so awful as Roxanna had suggested.
"You'd think we wasn't civilized, the way she
talks. Hanging's the worst that can happen, you know. We've got a gallows out
front of the courthouse in St. Paul can hang five at a time. Christ almighty, you should see that! Oh, sweet Jesus! But
don't you believe any of her bull about cutting folks up in pieces. There ain't
none of that. . .
anymore."
"Could
you tell me, please," I asked of him (for he seemed to be in a better mood
now than he'd been in the jeep), "where my daughter is?"
"The little girl? That lady back there's taking care of her. She asked to be the
foster-mother, and so. . . ."
"Petite! With that ogress? Nol" Julie struggled
against her bonds, while the plane began to taxi down the runway. "You
have to stop this machine. I must have my daughter back!" When the plane
was off the ground, even Julie could see the futility of farther complaint.
The
declining sun, scarcely five degrees above the horizon, was visible through
the right-hand windows of the cabin, so I knew we were flying south. It seemed
probable that so minuscule an aircraft could accomplish only a few hundred
miles without having to touch down for fuel. I knew there were important
kennels in that direction—Anoka, St. Cloud, etc.—but I had never paid any
attention to the geography of the Dingoes' settlements. But the guard had
mentioned one city-"St. Paul."
"What
will happen when we get to St. Paul?" I asked. "Will we be released
then? Or held in a dungeon?"
The guard laughed. He didn't bother to
explain the joke.
"Shall
I be tried in court? I demand a jury of my peers! I'm innocent. Julie witnessed
it. I didn't mean to. . . ."
As though in reproof, the guard walked to the
front of the small cabin to examine Bruno. I was left to stare out the window
at the laboring propellors and wish desperately for a Master to assist them at
their rustic task.
The
guard was called up front to confer with the pilot, and I tried to comfort
Julie with hollow reassurances. It was almost a relief when the erratic
behavior of the plane (how can the air be bumpy?) took our attention from longer-range
anxieties and focused it on the existential moment, now. The guard returned to
announce that the left-hand propellor had failed and the right-hand was going.
The plane was losing altitude (though I couldn't understand how he knew that,
since it was perfectly dark and there was no way to judge). I had to help him
jettison various complicated metal do-jiggers out the open hatch. The plane (we
were told) regained altitude, but it continued to make arrhythmic gasp-ings and
grindings. The guard made us get into parachutes and
showed us how they worked. One only had to jump, count to ten, pull the little
ring out, and wait to see if it would work.
"Have you ever done it?" I asked
the guard as we stood looking out the open hatch at the black nothingness
below. "Yeah, once. It was no picnic."
"But it did work? It usually works?"
"Yeah. The danger isn't so much in its not opening. It's how you land. You can
break a leg easy, and if you get caught in a bad wind—"
"Good-bye, Darling, Julie!" I shouted. "Wait for me. I'll rescue
you as soon as I possibly can."
And
then I was falling, the plane wasn't above me, only its fading noise. The stars
vanished as I fell through cloud-banks. I counted to five, and I couldn't think what "came next, so I pulled the
string, the chute opened, the strap across my chest tightened and pulled me
upright, and for a couple minutes I had nothing to do but swing back and forth
lazily in my lattice of straps and regret my hasty derring-do. For all I knew I
was over an ocean!
Landing,
I knocked my coccyx against some intractable concrete and twisted my ankle. All
about me the flood-fights switched on, and voices shouted contradictory orders.
"An excellent landing, sir. An as-ton-ishing landing, I would say: I
hope you're quite all right?" The man who addressed me was wearing an
overcoat similar to my own. He had great white Franz-Josef moustaches and
supported himself on an ornately carved walking stick. I had never seen so
wrinkled a face, except in reproductions of Rembrandts.
"Oh, quite," I replied. "Whom
do I have the honor of addressing?"
His hand came up in a stiff salute.
"Captain Frangle, sir. I'm commander of this here peniten-itentiary,
sir." "Peniten-itentiary?"
"Well,
that's what we used to call it. What's the word now? There's
so many new words for things, I tend to forget one here and one there.
Repatriation center—that's it! For the goddamned pets, you know."
CHAPTER 7:
In which I stand in debt to
N. Gogol.
Let
us say nothing of frying
pans and fires. Let us say nothing of probabilities. To have parachuted
smack-dab into the middle of the enemy's camp (and the neatest bomb could not
have dropped on its target more truly than I had, by blind chance) is an event
so deficient in probability that only the incontrovertible fact of its having
happened can ease my embarrassment in relating it. In fiction such a
coincidence would be inexcusable; in history these
things happen all the time.
So,
to return to la
chose veritable. . ..
"You have been," I asked,
hesitatingly, "expecting me?"
Captain
Frangle twirled a moustache craftily. "There have been rumors. . . .a word dropped here, and a word there .... Nothing you can put your finger on,
you understand .. . .nothing explicit, but
nevertheless."
"Rumors, you say? Exactly
what sort of rumors?"
"Oh—vague rumors,
sir! Extremely vague and indistinct. Almost unbelievable, but
nevertheless . . ." And the Captain winked knowingly.
"Nevertheless?" I insisted.
"What I meant to say was—nevertheless,
here you are, you see. Which shows, I think, that there must
have been something in the rumors after all. Then
again, perhaps not. Far be it from me to say, one way or the other. You would certainly know better than I,
Major." He trailed off into a laugh
of consummate self-deprecation. Then, turning to two of his underlings who had
been gathering up the folds of the parachute, he bade them hurry up with their
work—in quite opposite tones.
Now fortunately I was at that time well
enough acquainted with "The Inspector General," that splendid comedy
by the Russian master, Nikolai Gogol, to suspect a certain congruence between the situation of Gogol's
hero and my own plight. The eagle on the shoulder of my borrowed overcoat had
apparently deceived Captain Frangle into thinking I was his superior officer;
it also seemed that he had been anticipating the visit of a senior officer—and not with relish. For the time being I could hope to
keep up the bluff, but it was not an imposture that could be maintained
indoors, for beneath my overcoat and rubber boots I was naked as Lao-coon.
"A cup of coffee, Major? Or if you prefer something more . . . .spirited? Eh? Something to bring color to the cheek and a
smile to. . . . Eh? That is to say, if you don't object to a glass. . . .or two?
Eh?" All the while, Captain Frangle was edging toward a lighted doorway at
the corner of the compound.
"A few questions first, Captain, if you
don't mind."
"By all means, sir! Abso-Zufe-ly! We've nothing to hide from you, sir. Our hearts . . . and our hands . . . are as open for your
inspections as if . . . and, if you wish, our pocket-books, too! Only joking,
you understand, but feel free, Major. Make yourself
right at home in our little penitentiary here."
"How
many officers are here beside yourself? And how many
guards?"
"Officers? Well, Lieutenant Mosely, of course. Good
man,
Mosely. You've already met him, I think, when you
were at the Shroeder evacuation."
"Oh yes, Mosely. Where is Mosely?"
"He
was in the shower when you landed. I suppose he's getting dressed. He should be
out here any minute now. And you might count Palmino. He's only a warrant
officer, but he runs the radio shack and keeps the generator working for us. We
couldn't get on very well without Palmino, I'm afraid. Though
he's not really a gentleman . . . not like you and me, Major. And then
there's Doc Quilty and the Reverend Captain. The Reverend Captain will
probably want to discuss a matter of religion with you, sir. About
these goddamned pets. You see, he thinks
they should all be Baptists . . . now, understand, I have nothing against Baptists . . . some of my best friends are .
. . you know? But the shock —that's what I object to . . . all that currentl I mean. . . ."
"Later, Captain. How many guards?"
"No
doubt you've seen my last memo on that subject. There is nothing to add. The
situation has only become worse: desertions, betrayal, sabotage. . . .1 need guards to guard the guards, and that's a
fact. You see, now that the shouting's over, now that the monotony's setting in again, all the volunteers are . . . you know? And
only the regulars—the old Corps members, like myself.
. . ."
"I didn't ask for
excuses, Captain. Only for a number."
"Hundred and twenty. Less. I think. You see, sir, I can explain,
if. . . ."
"A hundred and twenty? For how many pets?"
"I'm
not sure of the exact number. It changes all the time. I don't understand. But
this prison was never meant to accommodate. . . ."
"Captain! The number!" This in my most peremptory tone.
"Thirteen thousand,
sir.
Give or take a few hundred."
"One guard for every hundred pets! How do you keep them under control?"
"Oh,
that's no problem. I could probably get by with ten guards if I had to. They're
only pets, after all. It's not as if ... I mean, they aren't like us. They don't seem quite . . .
what is the word . . . human? They know their place, and they keep in it. And then, you know, they're
in pretty poor spirits, thinking that their Masters have sold them back to us
for slaves."
"Slaves! The Masters? But
that isn't so?"
"Of
course, it isn't Zti-erally true, but how are they to know? Eh?" Captain Frangle had recovered some of his earlier
bounciness now that the worst of the interrogation seemed to be over, and he
began edging back toward the open doorway.
"Captain
Frangle, I did not give you permission to leave me!"
"No
sir! I only thought . . . that is, wouldn't you be more comfortable. . . ."
"Don't
concern yourself with my comfort, Misterl I am interested solely in the
management of this repatriation center. Or should I say mismanagement? I
suspect, Captain . . . I suspect. . . ."
Captain
Frangle had come tremblingly to attention, and he listened to my improvised
diatribe with visible dread. "Suspect, sir? May
I ask what? May I ask . . . who?"
"Ha!
Do you think I shall reveal that so
easily? It would make it altogether too easy for you, sir. Or, if not for you,
then for whomever has been. . . .responsible . . . for
these crimes."
"Not
me! No, you've been misinformed about. . . . The petty cash is short, perhaps,
I don't know. ... I would have to
examine ... it may take days . . . and another thing, I have my own way of
bookkeeping ... a safer way, I must
explain it to you first. ..."
"First,
Captain, I would like you
to assemble all the guards in this compound. Where I can see them. See that Lieutenant What's-His-Name looks after that."
"Lieutenant
Mosely."
"Him, yes. And I wish the barracks and rooms to be left in exactly the condition they're in now. The men will
assemble here in their shorts.
And
in stocking feet. The officers as well. See to it, Captain!"
While Captain Frangle roused up those few
guards who had not already been roused by the news of my so-sudden arrival, I
withdrew into the shadows and deliberated my next steps. When all guards and
the four other officers were present in ranks before me, I had Captain Frangle
show me to the door of the barracks.
"Mosely's room is in
this building?"
"The
next floor up, sir. His name is on the door."
"And
your room, Captain?"
"I
have the third floor to myself. I must explain . . . before you go up there .
. . that not everything you may find up there is what you would call, in the
strict sense, mine. I'm holding some articles in safekeeping for friends in
town . . . citizens who were afraid of the anarchists, the vandals,
you understand how it's been. . . ."
"You
will return to your men, Captain Frangle, and see that they remain at
attention. I do not tolerate laxity. There will be no conversations out there,
not even among the officers."
"Just
as you say, sir."
"Before you go, Captain—your uniform. Leave it on that . . ." What was the word? I couldn't
remember the word!
". . . on that.. . .
thing there."
"The bunk, you mean? But, Major,
consider my position
—my dignity. What will the men think if they see me out
there in
my dirty . . . that is to say, in the same state they're
in?"
"Perhaps you're right."
"Oh, thank you, Major, I knew you'd
understand." Captain Frangle began to leave, but once more I brought him
up short.
"I
didn't give permission to go, Captain. I must still insist on a complete
inspection. But you may submit to it here instead
of in the presence of your men. I expect to find you undressed by the time I've
returned from my inspection upstairs." With these words (which guaranteed
that, for the time being, the Captain would not have any opportunity to
converse with Mosely or anyone else who might have regarded my imposture with a keener eye) I turned my back on the Captain and went up a spiral staircase to the next floor.
Lieutenant
Mosely's room showed a pedantic respect for military punctilio. The walls were
daubed the same drab olive as the metal bedposts and wall locker. The uniforms
inside the locker were arrayed as if for an inspection. After assuring myself
of complete privacy, I took down his best dress uniform and pulled on the
trousers. The Lieutenant, fortunately, had a good figure, and the pants fit
reasonably well. His shirt proved to be a little loose at the collar, but I was
able to correct that by tightening the tie.
The
tie! That was nearly the death of my whole scheme. I had never worn a tie in my
life, and if I had, I certainly would not have been obliged to tie it myself. I
tried to improvise a knot or two, but nothing I could manage bore any
resemblance to what I had seen about Frangle's neck. Desperately I emptied out
Mosely's footlocker, hoping there might be a pre-knotted tie there. Instead, I
found his Manual of Arms, where on page 58 there are instructions for the
approved military four-in-hand. As the alarm clock on the window sill ticked
off the minutes, I fumbled with the maddening piece of silk. At last it passed
muster. (Lax muster.) By then I was in such a state of frazzlement that I
nearly forgot to remove the silver bars from the shoulders of Mosely's jacket
and replace them with the gold oak leaf from the overcoat I had been wearing. Then
I tried to squeeze into Mosely's parade shoes.
No
go. They were sizes too small. I tried in the next room. (Capt. C. Quilty, M.D., the placard on the door announced.) Quilty's
shoes, though nowhere near so well polished, fit snugly. I left Mosely's shoes
in Quilty's locker to cover up my theft.
As a
finishing touch, I retrieved a ragged copy of G.I. Jokes from the tumble of personal items that had
fallen out of the footlocker. Then, smartly turned out in dress uniform, I
returned to the dismantled, dismayed Captain Frangle on the floor below.
"I've
found what I sought, Captain. You may dress and accompany me back to the
compound."
Outside
Captain Frangle was able to obtain silence (and they were supposed to be at
attention!) by lifting one hand. After he'd given them appropriate hell, I had
him place Lieutenant Mosely under arrest. His hands were cuffed, his feet
shackled, and his mouth securely gagged.-
"I
have in my right hand," I then announced in my stagiest voice,
"evidence that this man, known to you as Mosely, is in reality an
impostor, a spy, an agent and a tool of the Mastery. The High Command first
grew suspicious of him at Shroeder, when he was seen to go alone into the
bombed power station there. ..."
A gasp went up among the men. "Captain, do you have a stone wheel—or
something equally suitable for starting a fire?"
"I have a cigarette
lighter."
"Set
this so-called 'jokebook' on fire, please. What harm has been done cannot be
undone, but the enemy shall not receive this report,
at least. Pray God we have stopped then-plot in time."
While
the jokebook burned, Lieutenant Mosely struggled against his bonds and went: Mmmph! Mmmphl Nn! Nn! Mmmmph!
"Captain, I presume you have a cell
where this man may be kept to await trial in solitary confinement?"
"We
do, but there are ten pets locked in there now. We're filled up . . . right to
the brim, as I explained before, but of course ... if you say. . . ."
"Put the pets elsewhere. Mosely is to be
kept strictly incommunicado. He will receive bread and water twice a day
—under my personal supervision. The man is known to be devilishly persuasive.
We can't take chances. As for his room, I shall take that for myself. There may
be other documents secreted there."
"Yes sir. Will that be all, sir? May I
release the men?"
"Not
just yet. I must see Mosely put away, and then I'd like you to accompany me on
a tour of the prison itself. If
I
wait till tomorrow the whole point of this inspection may have been lost. I
bust you take my meaning, Captain?"
"Perfectly,"
the old man assured me. "Like crystal." But truth to tell, he did
look a bit puzzled.
It
was easy enough to put it in terms he did understand.
"And then,
my good Captain, you may
explain your system of bookkeeping." Which Frangle understood perfectly,
like crystal.
Such is the wonder of military discipline
that the guards remained at attention out in the compound until two a.m. and
were quiet as churchmice all the while. Meanwhile I dined (the best meal I'd
had since coming to Earth and the most heartily appreciated of my life), then
with Frangle at my side took a leisurely tour of the prisons. It was. . . .
Unspeakable:
the crowding; close, fetid air; inadequate sanitary facilities. Since the
meager electric current produced by the prison's own emergency generators was
required for the operation of the security system, the only light in the
cellblock was what leaked in through the barred windows. The place was as gloomy
as the dark ages. Miseries heaped upon miseries, tier upon tier. And this was
only a single cell-block!
"How many more are there of these?"
"Besides this, nine."
After
I'd gone past only a few of the cells, playing the beam of a flashlight over
those sad heaps of still-proud bodies (so much finer than the ramshackle flesh
of the guards standing outside), meeting their anguished, pleading gazes, I
felt the bottom drop out. Pity consumed me, and rage seemed close behind.
Often, the puppies, less perfectly in control, would come to the bars and
stretch out their little hands for food. Captain Frangle would slap them away
with an indignant bellow. I am ashamed to say that I tolerated his behavior,
for I was still afraid he would construe my humanitarian impulses as being
un-Dingolike, and begin to suspect
"Oh
sir," one of the puppies begged, "can't you spare a scrap of food? For pity's sake, sir, some food!"
"Food? You'll get food, you little sonofabitch! You'll taste this fist if you don't lie back down there. Food? If
you're hungry you have only your father to blame—if you know who that is. There's plenty enough food outside these walls for
them as are willing to gather it up."
This
seemed to exceed the reasonable limits of abuse, and I said as much.
"But
it is their fault, Major, if you'll forgive my
saying so. We've sent out work parties of hundreds of men to take in the
harvests from the abandoned farms around here. It's August, and that food is
rotting away. The birds are eating it up, but these goddamned pets are so
goddamned lazy they won't lift their hands to feed their mouths."
Though
this seemed not quite credible, I determined to consult a calmer authority—if I
ever had the time.
Time—that
was the difficulty! For though I did feel o-bliged to exert the full force of
my spurious but nonetheless potent authority for the welfare and (if possible)
the freedom of these thirteen thousand pets, I knew that each new hour I spent
with Frangle only made my discovery that much more inevitable. My mask was
slipping, slipping. . . .
But—if I could release them that very night, I
would not only have done the prisoners a service but would myself benefit by
their escape, for their very numbers would act as a smokescreen to conceal my
own departure.
"I
intend to examine all ten cellblocks, Captain, but you needn't accompany me.
Just give me the keys. The ones for the individual cells, as
well as those for the cellblocks."
"Impossible, Major. We don't use keys, you know. Everything is done by electricity. You
can't beat that, you know . . . electricity!" He seemed to lay special importance upon this notion, and I nodded
sagely. Encouraged, he went on: "Electricity is man's most powerful
servant. It is the doorway to tomorrow. It's another Aladdin's Lamp. I love
electricity, and electricity loves me."
"Fine. I love it too. But who's the electrician
here—the man who can open the doors? I want to get this inspection
over with."
"We
don't have an electrician—in the strict sense. Palmino— the warrant officer—he
does that sort of thing for us—in an amateur sort of way. Nothing very refined
about him, you understand, but he keeps it running."
"Let
me see the switchbox that controls the cells—and send Palmino to meet me there.
You, meanwhile, can put the time to use ordering your books."
Frangle
grasped my hand with speechless gratitude. He didn't need speech, for he had
just slipped me five hundred-dollar bills in the Dingo currency. I put the
bribe in my pocket, and tears sprang to the eyes of Captain Frangle.
The man who came into the radio shack had a
head of black hair so thick with dirt and oil that it looked like an engine
component. His swarthy skin was corrugated by decades of acne, and his narrow
eyes, magnified by thick glasses, glistened with rheum. He was short; he was
overweight; he was ill-proportioned. He was, in short, exactiy my idea of a
Dingo.
The
Dingo saluted smartly. "Major Jones? Warrant-Officer Palmino reporting for
duty, as ordered, sir."
I
returned what I hoped was a convincing salute, but I boggled in replying to
him. By what title should an officer address a warrant officer? There were
whole worlds of protocol I was still innocent of. I had got through the bit
with Frangle by piecing together faded memories of novels and Van Stroheim
movies. Slipping, slipping. . ..
"Very
well, Palmino," I replied, turning away from him, simulating
absentmindedness. "I wish all the cell-blocks to be opened. And then all
the cells themselves. For my inspection. Immediately." I turned to leave.
"I'm afraid that can't be done, Major
Jones. They can only be opened in sequence. That's S.O.P." Then, as though in mockery. "Standard operating
procedure, you know."
"My
orders override standard procedure, Palmino. You will obey my orders.
The Dingo laughed aloud.
"I don't think so, sir. If I may
make a
suggestion, sir, I think you will obey mine." Palmino
took a
pistol from the drawer of his desk and pointed the
end
with a hole in it at me.
The show was over, obviously. The mask was
off. "How »
"There
were a dozen signs, sir—easily a dozen. Though I have been admiring the way you ride right over them. With me helping out, it
will be a lot easier now."
"Helping out?"
"Don't
interrupt me, sir," he commanded meekly. "I was just telling you how
I figured it all out. First, there was an announcement over the radio here that
a pet had escaped from an airplane flying from Duluth to St. Paul—" (So, I
thought—flat's where
Julie will be!) "—which
pet was said to be last seen wearing a major's overcoat. That was a very
suggestive clue to me, sir. The report came over the air a few moments after
you'd landed. I put two and two together."
"Helping me, you say?"
"And
then I observed that you had about two inches of
skin showing between the hem of your coat and the top of your boots, whereas
when you came out of the barracks you was wearing what appeared to me to be
Lieutenant Mosely's parade uniform. Ah-hal I
said to myself, there's
something fishy going on!"
"I have money, if that's what you want.
. . ."
"Finally,
when I came in here I
addressed you as Major Jones,
if you recall. Whereas the
name of the Major we've been expecting is Worthington. When you didn't object to being called Jones, everything seemed to fit together. Like the pieces of a jigsaw. It all
came to me in a flash."
"Five hundred dollars?"
"You
didn't listen! You pets are all alike—snobs I You think
you're so much better than we are, and you're not worth the bullets it would
take to kill you. If I didn't need you to help me, I'd like to. . . .I'd make
you five in my body for a while. That would show you I" Palmino's eyes grew rheum-ier; his pistol trembled with emotion.
"What
is it you want of me? Practically speaking, that is." "I want to be a
pet."
"I'm
sure we all do. All thirteen thousand of us. But the
Masters have gone. They've deserted us."
"They'll return. Well wait for them.
Here."
"That's
fine for you, but I can't stay on indefinitely. When the real Major Worthington
arrives—"
"We'll
see he has a good funeral. Mosely, too. I never did
like that bastard Mosely. And Frangle—you're going to start putting the screws
on Frangle. Oh, we'll have fun while we wait, sir, let me tell you. There are
about five thousand bee-t/oo-tiful bitches in those cells, sir. Five
thousand—god damn I"
"Really,
Palmino, if you want to become a pet, you're going about it in the wrong way. I
appreciate your cooperation, but no Master would tolerate the kind of actions
you have in mind."
"So?
When they get me, they can reform my character. I won't object to that. I'd
probably like myself a lot better then. They can cure my acne and deepen my
voice. They can give me 20-20
vision and fill me brimful
with hormones and sweet charity. I'm willing. But meanwhile I'll enjoy myself."
"I need time to think about this. By myself."
"Take
fifteen minutes. But remember—if you don't go along with me, you'll be going against me. In which case, Captain Frangle will
learn all about Major Jones.
Think about it—but don't
think you can do with me like you did with Mosely—because I've already told
four of the guards-friends of mine—which way the wind is blowing. And I don't
intend to let you know which
four. But you go right
ahead and think about it."
I went to Mosely's room. The window above the
bed was not barred, and it was a negligible fifteen-foot drop from the ledge.
No one would observe me, since the guards Were still assembled at attention in the compound. It would be a simple
matter to escape across the fields and hide out in other abandoned farmhouses
as I worked my way south to St. Paul and Darling, Julie. What purpose, after
all, could I expect to serve by releasing these thousands of prisoners? What
had they that was worth escaping to? Why should they risk their lives? The Masters' return was, as Palmino
had pointed out, their only hope, and the Masters would not be much hindered by
prison walls.
I
was perched on the window ledge, ready to leap, my feet dangling down over the
rough stones, when I heard, distantly, a tenor voice, ineffably sad, a voice
that could have melted even so adamantine a heart as Palmino's with its
melancholy refrain:
A! che la morte
ognora £ tarde nel venir a chi desia, a chi desia morirl
(Which I would translate roughly thus:
Ah! how tardily
death draws nigh to he who, to he who desires to die!)
It was the last act of II Trovatore! It was St. Bernard!
St.
Bernard's voice was joined by Clea's faltering soprano. It is unreasonable, I
know—it was madness—but I decided that moment that, willy-nilly, I would have
to stay. My mother had thought nothing of deserting me when I was the merest pup, but my conscience would not be eased by that.
I would have to rescue Motherlove from the Dingoes.
CHAPTER
8:
In
which we may witness some of the sad consequences of domestication.
"And
these," Doctor Quilty
explained, waving a pudgy hand at certain rude upheavals of unfenestrated
brick, "are the ovens."
"They're
very big," I commented blandly. (Wanting very much to add—And ugly.
But one of the first
lessons Palmino had given me was to steer clear of aesthetic judgments. The
average Dingo was too much at home with ugliness to notice any but the most
awful examples.)
"We
used to use gas, but that was before the manufacturer who supplied it to us
went out of business. A pity too . . . gas is much more efficient. But the
whole chemical industry is gone now—or going. For which we have the Masters to
blame. All these years of free power have sapped our technological strength.
Fortunately, Frangle was able to have the ovens converted."
"To
what? Electricity?"
The
Doctor laughed nervously, as at a particularly gauche joke. "Hardlyl We
bum logs. You'd be surprised the temperatures one can build up that way. The
problem is getting these goddamned pets to go out and cut down the trees. Without
lots of firewood, we can't work the ovens to capacity."
"What is their capacity?"
"I'm
told that working all the ovens around the clock they can turn out twenty
thousand units. But of course we don't work all around the clock. And since
it's the goddamned, lazy pets who have to do all the heavy work, we don't come
anywhere near capacity even in the ovens that are working. Talk about
feet-dragging!"
"How many do you do, then?"
"No
more than five hundred. That's a good day. You can see that that doesn't come
anywhere near our needs. Ideally, this should be a profit-making
proposition."
"Selling the ash as
fertilizer, you mean?"
"Say,
that's an angle that never occurred to me! We've just been dumping the ashes
till now. Would you like to see the
operation? Are you interested in that sort of thing?"
"By all means, Doctor.
Lead the way."
"It's
just around . . . Oh! Just a second, please, Major. My
feet! there's something wrong with them these last few
days. They've been swelling up. ... I
don't understand it."
"Perhaps," I suggested with a small
laugh, "it's not your feet at all. Perhaps your shoes are growing
smaller?"
Doctor
Quilty smiled wanly in reply, as he loosened his laces. A fat man, Doctor
Quilty: even so slight an effort as stooping over his shoes caused him to be
flushed and short of breath. His sad flesh drooped in dewlaps from his face and
forearms, and his great belly was an edifying reminder of man's immemorial
bondage to gravity and death.
Limping,
Quilty led me around the comer of the building, where we could see teams of
dispirited pets hauling sawn-up logs from stacks outside the main gate of the
prison and restacking them again within the gate. The whole operation,
involving nearly fifty pets, was being supervised by only one drowsy guard.
"Look
at them I" Quilty said scornfully. "They don't put
any more muscle into the job than a bunch of women would. With their bodies,
you'd think they'd at least be able to lift logs."
"Could
it be their morale? Perhaps if they were working . . . somewhere else ... at some other sort of work? Maybe
they're depressed
by the ovens."
"No,
take my word for it, they'd do the same halfassed job no matter what land of
work you set them to. And in any case, why should this sort of work depress
them? I don't understand you, Major."
I
colored, mortified at having to become so explicit. It seemed gruesome.
"Wouldn't they show more spirit, if they were working . . . more in their
own interest? Or at least not so entirely against it?"
"But
what could be more in their own interest than this? Where else do you think their food comes
from?"
"Surely,
Doctor, you don't mean to say that . . . that these ovens supply. . . ."
"Every loaf of bread in this prison, Major. Yes sir, we're set up to be completely
self-sufficient. And we would be too, if these goddamned pets would show some
backbone!"
"Oh, that
kind of oven! WelL then there must be some other sort of
reason, I suppose, for their apathy. Perhaps they're not interested in baking
any more bread than they can eat themselves. Rather like the Little Red Hen, if
you've read that story."
"Can't say I have, Major, not being as much of a reader as I'd like
to be. But the point is—they won't even bake that much. There are
pets in the cellblocks who are starving, while these
curs won't get themselves into a sweat unless you take a whip to them. They
just don't have any sense of the consequences of their own actions. They want
to be fed, but they won't take the trouble of feeding themselves. That's almost
what it amounts to."
"Surely you're exaggerating,
Doctor."
"It's
hard to believe at first, I know. Take another case in point: the other day
they sent out two hundred, men and women, to dig up potatoes, turnips, and such
from the old fields hereabouts. Well, those two hundred pets returned from
their day's work with no more than ten pounds of potatoes per capita. That's Latin, you know. We doctors are
obliged to learn Latin. Two thousand pounds of potatoes to feed to thirteen
thousand prisoners! And you can't tell me they're not hungry, because, damn it,
they're starving!"
"It
must be something in their background," I theorized, incautiously.
(Palmino had been very explicit on just that point: "A Major should never express an opinion that someone else might think original.")
"They've come to expect their food to be handed to them outright. And
they've grown to feel a positive antipathy for any sort of work. That's
understandable.
"I
don't pretend to understand
it," Quilty said, shaking his head and setting the folds of his chin into
swaying motion. "Everybody has to work—that's fife."
"Well,
workers—of course they have
to work. But perhaps the pets—the goddamned pets, I should say—have an
attitude more like our own, Doctor. Perhaps they think of themselves—however
misguidedly—as officers and gentlemen."
"Do
you think doctoring isn't work?" Quilty
asked, wonder-struck. "There are few nastier jobs, to my mind, than poking around in other people's pustules and looking down
their throats and sticking your finger up their pons assinorvm!"
"You're
right, Doctor. Absolutely-but still, don't you think there's an essential
difference between ourselves and common laborers? As you point out, work is
demeaning, and if a person could possibly get by without doing any. . . ."
"De-mean-ing? I didn't say thatl I love my
work, Major. I need
it. I couldn't get through
one week without it. But that doesn't mean I have to pretend it's
any bed of roses. It's a job, the same as any other, and it has its bad points
the same as. . . . Major? Major, is something wrong? Are you ill? Your face is
so. . . ."
My
sudden pallor had betrayed the emotion that had overcome me: fear. Only a few
yards away and looking directly, intently at me was St. Bernard. He had been
among the members of the log-hauling crew. Smiling, but still uncertain, he
began walking toward me.
"Back
in line there!" the guard bellowed. St. Bernard paid no attention.
"White Fang! Bruderlein,
bist dv?" His
arms closed about me in a brotherly embrace of irresistible force.
"Help! Guard!" I shouted. "Arrest this
madman! Get him off of me! Throw him into prison, into solitary!"
St.
Bernard's friendly features clouded with perplexity. As the guard pulled him
away, I tried, with a mime show of winks and grimaces, to tell him that he had
nothing to fear.
"If
you want this guy in solitary, shall I put Mosely somewhere else?" the
guard demanded.
"No
I Leave Mosely alone. Surely you can find someplace to stick this one till I have a chance to
cross-examine him. I know—lock him in my room
and post a guard outside the door. And—" (whispering in the guard's ear)
"—don't be too rough with him. I want him fresh when I get to him. Then
I'll by-god make him wish he'd attacked somebody else.
"Goddamned
pets," I grumbled, returning to Quilty, whose bewilderment might at any
moment, I feared, change to suspicion. "I think they must all be crazy."
Which seemed a pretty weak explanation for
that last episode with St. Bernard, but happily it contented Quilty. He even
waxed enthusiastic. "Insanity—that's exactly my theory,
Major! If you had the time, there's a case I've been studying which I'd like you to see. The
most extreme example of its type. The classic symptoms
of psychosis. A beautiful compulsion
neurosis. It would only take a moment.
Then, if you wanted to, we could come back to see the ovens."
"Take
me to Bedlam, Doctor. Let's see all your
lunatics. A day of watching madmen should be much more entertaining than a
peek into the ovens."
"Splendid.
But let us walk more slowly, if you please, Major. My
feet seem to hurt more every minute."
I should explain somewhere along here that,
though this was my third day at the St. Cloud Women's Reformatory (such had
been its purpose only a short time before and such has become its purpose
again), I had not attempted in the interim to make contact with St. Bernard or
Clea. Until such time as I could effect their rescue
it would have been an empty—and a dangerous—gesture to have disclosed my
presence to them. Dangerous, because it was quite probable that Palmino would
learn of their special significance to me and thus have additional resources
for blackmail—or betrayal. I dreaded to think to what actions his cruel and
lascivious nature would lead him were he to discover Clea was my mother!
Already it had taken all my persuasive gifts to make him spare Mosely's life,
and, even so, I could not prevent Palmino's nightly interrogations of the
unfortunate lieutenant (for which the general opinion held me responsible),
though the piteous nocturnal cries arising from the solitary cell caused me to
weep tears as I waited out the torturous hours concealed in the radio shack.
I tried as much as possible to escape
Palmino's baleful influence by spending my time with the other officers—either
exercising a restraining influence upon Captain Frangle's avarice, or
accompanying the Reverend Captain or Doctor Quilty as they went about their
rounds, baptizing and healing.
Between those two men, the latter was more to
my taste, a favoritism that Quilty reciprocated.
"Like
you, I'm a skeptic. Cogito,
ergo sum. I
doubt, therefore I am. That's Descartes." Quilty had made this declaration
in the middle of a discussion of the Reverend Captain's rather roughshod
missionary tactics. "I believe, with the immortal Sigmund Freud, in the
power of reason. I don't suppose that you military men get to study much about
psychology? All that depth stuff must be a terra incognita to you guys."
"Unless
you'd count military strategy in that category, I guess I haven't studied much
psychology." That, I felt sure, was exactly the sort of thing a genuine
Major would say.
"Yes.
. . . Well, that's a very special branch of the subject. Along more general
lines, however, you've probably read very little except The Life of Man. You must know that by heart though—eh, Major?"
"Oh.
. . ." (I'd never heard of the book) ". . . .parts. Other parts I only remember vaguely,
indistinctly."
"You're
probably surprised to hear me speak of it as a book of psychology—and yet it's
one of the profoundest examinations of the subject ever written by the pen of
man. Yet it's also eminently practical."
"I've
never heard it expressed quite this way, Doctor. Do go on."
"You know where he says: "When the gods are malign, men worship at the feet of
demons.' Now the Reverend Captain would probably interpret that in a strictly
religious sense—and of course he would not be entirely wrong. But those words
also express an important psychological insight. Oh, my
feet!"
"What's
wrong?"
"Nothing, only a twinge. I was just trying to make a point, and that
is—what the Reverend Captain calls baptism is actually
a venerable therapeutic tool in the history of psychology. I'll bet you didn't
know that, did you?"
"Actually, no."
"Yes.
We psychologists used to call it shock treatment."
"Here they are, Major. The nuts—in this
whole cellblock you won't find anything else. And these, I should point out,
are only the worst, the most hopeless cases. 'Autism' is the technical word
that we psychologists use to describe their condition."
"I like it. It's far more restful here
than in the other cell-blocks. It rather reminds me of a beehive—that humming
sound."
"It's
so restful that we don't even have to use guards for this building. They sit
like that all day long, mumbling their sick nonsense, or listening to other
sick nonsense from somebody else. Impossible to understand
them. They eat a bit of porridge in the morning and drink a bowl of
broth at night—and even that has to be put in their hands. Otherwise they'd
just sit there and starve to death. Pets!"
"How do you explain
their condition, Doctor?"
"Insanity,
that's my theory. The shock of S-Day—" (this was
the Dingoes' name for the day on which the sunspots had blown the Masters'
fuseboxes) "—was a traumatic experience for them. Consequendy, they
retreated into themselves until. . . ." (the
Doctor finished his sentence with a sweeping gesture that included all five
tiers of cells) ". . . this happened.
"Of
course," he continued, in a somewhat chastened tone, "it's only a theory."
"It seems quite sound to me, Doctor. I wouldn't
apologize."
"Do you like it? Come then, I want to
show you my most interesting patient. This one is for the textbooks. If only
Professor Freud were alive today! How he would have enjoyed this one!"
We
climbed up a metal staircase to the third tier of cells and down a long
corridor that took us farther and farther from what little sunlight sneaked
into the building through the dirty skylights. There, standing in the center of
a group of puppies and young dogs who were attentive to the point of being
hypnotized, swaying in time to the incantatory rhythms of his own speech, was my brother Pluto. I recognized what he was reciting
immediately: it was A Prayer
for Investments from
his latest Book of Ceremonies. This brief work is meant to be sung by two
antiphonal choirs of fifty voices each, supported by chamber orchestras. While the Celebrant dresses (or "invests") himself in the
three "sacred" articles of clothing. It can be an awesome
spectacle, but in these reduced circumstances it could inspire only pathos or
derision. For an alb Pluto had a begrimed undershirt; his chasuble was a
floursack stolen from the bakery; his ring was a rusty bolt. Yet for all the
ridiculousness of his appearance, Pluto was not entirely a figure of fun. The
nobility of the prayer itself—which I transcribe from memory—went far to redeem
him:
A Prayer of Investments
(Investment
of the Alb)
Pure
white suds Lemon yellow The black krater Bone white
salve
(Investment
of the Chasuble)
Colorful
gown Trimmed with yellow lace Colorful gown Laced with silver
(Investment
of the Ring)
Navy
blue buttons Soft black pus Dark gold ochre Blacky black black
"You
see what I mean?" Quilty said, digging at my ribs with his soft elbow.
"He's as nutty as peanut butter. They all are."
"Actually, he seems remarkably
unchanged." "How's that! You've seen this fellow somewhere
before? When?"
I
was rescued from the necessity of having to seal up this new breach in my
defenses by the timely arrival of two guards who were conducting the shadowy
figure of a manacled bitch. "I'm sorry, Major,"
one guard said, "but orders came in over the short wave to let this woman
look around for her son. The both of them is ordered
to be transported to St. Paul."
"That's
him," the bitch said, pointing. "That's my son Pluto."
So
Roxanna had finally got around to reporting the probability of my brother and
mother being among the captive pets I I had dreaded this moment.
"Exactly!" I rasped in my most Dingo-like tones.
"I have been expecting something like this.' Before they are sent off, I
had better give them a preliminary interrogation. Take them to my chamber,
where the other prisoner is already. I shall be there immediately."
Clea,
though but ill-acquainted with the timbre of my voice, stepped forward to peer
at me in the gloom, but I turned my back on her abruptly. "Take them away!
There is no time to spare!"
When the four of us—St. Bernard and Clea,
Pluto and myself—were together in the quarters of the
unfortunate Lieutenant Mosely, I explained to them, as well as I could, how I
had come to be in my present, so-convenient position. Only Pluto received my
story calmly and without repeated protests and expressions of incredulity—and I
suspect this was because he wasn't really listening to me at all, but to the
sweeter voices of his own superior, interior world.
"Impossible!"
Clea declared firmly. "You can't expect us to believe such a fairy tale.
Parachuting right into the prison compound in the middle of the night! In a
major's overcoat! Tell me another!"
"But
if he says so, Clea,"
St. Bernard protested, "it must he true. White Fang wouldn't lie to a
blood-brother."
"The
problem isn't whether you care to believe me—but how we are to escape. You dare
not let them transport you to St. Paul. It is the capital of the Dingoes. Your
best safety was to lose yourself among the millions of other abandoned pets.
How was it that you let them find you out, Clea?"
"They came around calling for me and
Pluto by name. They said the Masters were taking us back. I didn't know if I
could believe them, but it seemed that anything would be better than this
hellhole. So I spoke up before someone else got the same idea."
"I've
already made some escape plans," St. Bernard volunteered. "Is it
safe for me to speak of them aloud in this room? Yes? How about digging a
tunnel? Under the wall. When I was down in the
basement of the bakery I saw that it had a dirt floor. Dirt—that eliminates half of the difficulty from
the start.
Imagine tunneling through stone! Now, if we start the tunnel there and dig
west. . . ."
"But
it's over a hundred yards from there to the wall!"
"So much the better! They'll expect us to start somewhere else. I figure with two men
working all through the night, the tunnel can be done in a month."
"A month!" Clea scoffed. "But I'm to be carted off tonight!"
"Hm! That puts things in a different light. Well,
in that case, I have a second
plan. Here, let me
demonstrate. . . ." He ripped the bedsheets off the bunk and began
shredding them into long strips. "We'll knot these strips together—into a
rope ladder—like this. Now here, White Fang, you take this end—and I'll take
this end. Now, pull! That's it! Harder! Oops!
"Hm. Does anyone know a better knot?"
"What do you need a rope ladder for?" I asked. It was only a
fifteen-foot drop from the window of my room, after all, as St. Bernard must
have been well aware after spending the last few hours confined there.
"I
thought you and I could take care of the guards at the southwest tower—the one
with the nice crenelations—and then we'd climb the stairs to the top, and then
use the rope ladder to climb down."
"But
I can just order the guards to let us go up to the top."
"So much the better. Our only problem in that case is making sure the knots will hold. Is a
square knot over-and-under and under-and-over or under-and-over and
over-and-under? I can never get it straight."
"But
we don't have to go to the top of the tower, St. Bernard. If it were just a
simple matter of getting out of the prison, we could jump from the window of this room."
"You
mean you won't need a rope ladder at all?" He
sounded terribly hurt.
"Finding
a way out of the prison is not the entire problem, St. Bernard. Think of the
thousands of other pets I'll be leaving in Frangle's hands. What will become of
them? Yes, and there's the little matter of eluding
Palmino, who's on to my masquerade. I have every reason to believe that he has
my least actions closely observed. And he will do his utmost to keep me here, for it's only through me that he possesses a large
degree of power here, or hopes of a life in the asteroids hereafter. The
problem, then, is not so much escaping from this prison as from him. Palmino—that's the real problem."
"Thank
you, Major Jones, but it isn't the case any more," said Palmino, stepping
into the room, brandishing that little pistol of his. "The real problem is
escaping with
him."
"Would
you introduce your friend, White Fang?" Clea asked loftily.
"Mother,
this is Warrant-Officer Palmino. Officer Palmino, (his is my mother, Miss Clea
Melbourne Clift." Clea offered Irt
hand to Palmino, who
received it with his pistol-hand. With a deft motion Motherlove wrenched the
pistol from Palmino.
"Now,
apologize to my son, young man, for this rude interruption,
and pray, explain yourself more fully." -
"I'm sorry. Okay? And you're going to be sorry too. Because
they're on to us. I've intercepted radio messages. They're arriving
tonight en
masse."
"Who? Why? How?"
"The troops from Shroeder and from Fargo. Even a contingent from
the capital. They must know you're here, running the operation. You
see, there's something I didn't have a chance to tell you. It sort of slipped
my mind. Yesterday afternoon Major Worthington showed up for that inspection.
The sentry saw him—and as luck would have it, he was one of my men. He
fired—"
"But
I told you I wouldn't allow thatl I can't afford to be involved in murder. Things are bad enough already."
"It
wasn't murder. The way I see it, it was self-defense. Anyhow, as it happens, it
doesn't make any difference what you want to call it, because the sentry had
bad aim and Worthington was only wounded. He escaped. He told the Inductance
Corps, and they're coming to lay siege to the prison."
"Then it's all overl You
botched itl We're throughl" "No—wait till I've explained everything.
We're saved, maybe. I've been radioing to the Masters, and. . . ."
"Do
they still use radios here?" St. Bernard asked. "I've heard some
charming transcriptions of the old radio programs. Do you know The Green Hornet? Thrilling stuff. But I'm surprised to hear that the Masters
listen to the Dingoes' programs."
"It
was more like an SOS than a program that I sent out. I've been calling for help
ever since Worthington got away. After all, it can't make much difference if
it's intercepted."
"Did you contact them? That's the
important thing."
"I
think so. I contacted someone. But how can I tell who it is? It's all in
Morse. Anyhow, I went under the assumption that it was them. We bargained all
morning before we reached an agreement. I said I'd help all the pets get out of
the prison, and they promised to let me and four friends come along with the
pets and live in a kennel. So now it's only a matter of assembling all the pets
around Needlepoint Hill at twelve tonight."
"Why
do we have to take them outside the prison? That sounds like a trick."
"It
has something to do with the field of potential. It's stronger in places that
come to a point. Thirteen thousand pets would weigh a good two thousand tons,
and the Masters say they're still weak from S-Day. Do you think we should
trust them?"
"Unless
you're ready to withstand a siege, it looks like we'll have to. But how are we
going to get thirteen thousand pets out the gates by twelve tonight? What
explanation could we possibly give Frangle for it? There must be limits to the
man's credulity."
"I
don't know," Palmino said, shaking his greasy, black curls in perplexity.
"I thought we might send some of the pets out on work details with my guards, and the others could sneak out this window. One
at a time. Unobtrusively, sort of."
"The
others? The thirteen thousand others?"
"It's
sticky," Palmino agreed, digging his fingers into his hair. "It's
really sticky."
Pluto,
who had till this time given no impression of being aware of the matters under
discussion, suddenly arose from the corner in which he had been sitting in
Gandhi-like self-absorption, and, raising the bolt-bedizened forefinger, announced
in magistral tones:
"Now here's my plan. .. ."
CHAPTER 9:
In
which we may witness Salami, and almost everybody escapes.
The
great escape plot
almost foundered at its launching, due to Pluto's artsy-fartsy insistence on
arena staging.
"Theatre-in-the-round,
my good God I" I exclaimed. "These are Dingoes, not Elizabethans',
boy. The groundlings, the Great Unwashed, the stinking rabble
that doesn't know the difference between a Holbein and a hole in the ground.
What did Bizet say when he sat down to write the Toreador Song? He said, if they want merde, 111 give
them merde. This is Mass Culture. You're in Hollywood, now. Remember it."
"But
a proscenium arch! It's . . . it's indecent! Hamlet had arena staging. It was good enough for Marlowe; it was good enough
for Jonson; it was good enough for Shakespeare; and it's good enough for
me."
"Amen, brother!"
said Clea, clapping her hands.
"They
used a proscenium arch at Bayreuth," St. Bernard ventured timidly. Logical
discourse was not his element.
"And
if it was good enough for Wagner, it should be good enough for us," I
said, grateful for whatever allies. "Illusion—that's the
ticket! People like to be fooled. Besides, if we don't have a big old
painted backdrop, how will we get everyone out the gate? This isn't art for
art's sake, but for ours."
"Philistine!" Pluto growled. "Have it your way
tonight, but if we ever get this show out of the provinces. . . ."
"Once
we're in Swan Lake, I wash my hands of it. But for tonight, we'd better move.
Clea, start the ladies sewing up costumes and rehearsing the production
numbers. Remember, sex is everything. And they've got to fill up a lot of time,
so don't let them have anything until they're screaming for it— and then give
them half. Palmino, you've got an exodus to organize and a set to pound
together. Don't fuss over the style, but make sure the backdrop is opaque.
Pluto, you can start helping St. Bernard with his lines."
"But they aren't
written yet."
"Too late, too late. Give him his lines now and write them when you get to Swan Lake. That
was Shakespeare's way. For my own part, I'll be the rest of the day at least
convincing Frangle that Salami's
going to be the solution to
his morale problem."
"Not salami," Pluto
protested,"—Salomel"
"Salami," I
said sternly. "Remember—you're in Hollywood now."
"Salami?" Captain Frangle asked, giving a bewildered
twist to his moustaches. "For my part—that is to say, speaking
unofficially—I think it could be very, uh, beautiful ... is that the word? The
Bible and all, yes—but nevertheless."
"Nevertheless,
Captain?"
"Nevertheless,
the men, you know. The men are a crude sort, generally speaking. Not that I
wouldn't enjoy a, uh, what is the word ...
a little culture? . . . myself, you understand. I've
always fancied myself an intellectual, you know, but nevertheless."
"Oh,
as for the men, I can assure you there won't be anything highbrow about this
production. You know the story of Salami, of
course?"
"Of course. That is to say ... if you
could refresh my memory . . . ?"
"By all means." And I told him the story, more or less as it
appears in Matthew and Mark and Wilde and Hoff-mansthal—and in the Rita
Hayworth movie that had given Pluto his inspiration. Thank heaven for the film
archives at the Shroeder Kennel! Pluto had altered the traditional story
somewhat in the interests of heightened vulgarity.
"And
all that is in the Bible?" Frangle asked, at the conclusion of my tale.
"Even as I have
said."
"And they're going to do
that on stage—here?"
"As
I've been given to understand, five hundred or more of the most beautiful
bitches in the penitentiary are rehearsing the roles of the harem slaves. Salami herself is a vision of such chaste purity that words are
inadequate."
"It
might be a very rewarding experience at that. Eh, Major? I've always held that
religious education is essential to the moral well-being of an army. Wasn't it
Napoleon who said an army travels on its soul? Too many commanders
diese days are willing to let spiritual matters go to hell."
"I never thought you were one, Captain
Frangle."
Frangle
smiled and adjusted one moustache to an expression of modest self-satisfaction
and the other to jandy anticipation. "When does the fun begin?"
"At
nme-thirty, Captain. Prompdy at nine-thirty."
Promptly
at nine-forty-five, the curtain rose and one hundred and fourteen guards and
three officers of the St. Cloud Repatriation Center gasped as one man as they
caught then-first view of Herod's Palace in Galilee, brilliantly illuminated by
the four searchlights which had been taken down from the prison watchtowers.
The backdrop represented an infinite perspective of lotus columns and gothic
vaulted roofs, of gilded carytids and marble pylons, of niches and cornices and
ogive windows looking out upon still vaster Babylonian perspectives—a mural
that had been the corporate achievement of two hundred and several pets—and
looked it. The composition flowed freely from style to style, from Poussin to
Chirico and thence to Constable, as naturally as a spring
brook babbles over a bed of boulders. Every square inch glowed with a
disquietingly gemlike light, since the paint was still fresh and sticky.
The
orchestra struck up the overture—a hastily reconstituted version of the Tales of the Vienna Woods, which had, despite itself, a rather oriental
character, due to our instruments: water pipes and water xylophones, garbage
can tympani, and a string section of barbed wire and bedsprings.
When
the effect of these splendors began to dim, Pluto, in sacerdotal robes and a
long false graybeard, came centerstage and declaimed,
in his most magistral tone: "And Behold!"
And behold, the chorus lines of Herod's wives and concubines
came marching in from stage right and stage left, respectively, one thousand
strong. They overflowed the stage and filled the courtyard. Not Solomon in all
his glory had it so good.
"And behold, it came to pass in those
days that Herod was Tetrarch of Galilee. Even Herod Antipasto—"
Herod Antipasto, with a
Falstaffian gut, size 15 shoes, a putty nose, and long, gray moustaches not
unlike the Captain's, entered at the end of the chorus line, hiking up his
fancy robes and kicking his hairy legs, blithely out of time with the
orchestra's galop, and pmching occasional asses to the loud delight of his
audience.
"Now Herod was a cruel
king who liked nothing better than his brother's wife, Herodias Antipasto—unless
it was his brother's wife's daughter, Salami Antipasto." Enter Herodias, swinging her boa. Enter
Salami, in a sedan chair borne by eight Nubians. For the
time being, Salami kept her beauty dimmed behind the curtains of the sedan
chair, only peeking out briefly to wink in my direction. Frangle, sitting
beside me, exclaimed: "Did you see that? Did you see how she looked right at me?"
"Now
it came to pass in those days, even then, that Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee, had
a big party, and he invited everybody. He
invited the Romans and their wives . . ." Enter the Romans and their
wives. "The Egyptians and their wives." Who entered. "The Nubians and their
wives." And many more, each doing the
characteristic national striptease. But somehow, no matter how many
people Herod invited, the courtyard never seemed to get any more crowded.
When
everyone had got to the party at last, Pluto assumed a gloomy tone: "But
Herod had forgotten to invite one person to his big party, and that person
found out that he'd been left out in the cold, and he was very angry, and
behold he was called the Baptist, even St. Bernard."
Enter
the aforementioned, with much clashing of garbage cans. St. Bernard sang the
Toreador Song from Carmen,
with new lyrics that
expressed his pique at not receiving an invitation and also scolds the Tetrarch
for marrying his brother's wife. This accomplished, he joined Motherlove, as
Salami, in the love duet from La Boheme.
"And behold, Herod waxed hot with anger,
and he ordered his henchmen to put the Baptist down in the dungeon, and behold
St. Bernard the Baptist slew three hundred soldiers with the jawbone of an
ass!"
And sure enough, behold—for twenty minutes
St. Bernard lay about him, scattering the dead on all sides. The stage swarmed
with litter bearers and nurses and fresh replacements. It had scarcely been
cleared stage right, before St. Bernard had reaped a new harvest stage left—and
singing all the while. It was a wonderful fight, and the groundlings loved it,
but the odds were against him, and at last he was caught and hauled away. To
celebrate Herod's victory, a thousand new dancing girls trooped in to the
strains of the Triumphal March from Aida.
Pluto's
narration went on to describe how Salami and the Baptist were passionately in
love with each other, but that Herod was determined to keep them apart because
he loved Salami himself. Salami, hoping to save her lover, goes to her mother
Herodias, who persuades her daughter (and this is the part that Pluto lifted
from the Rita Hayworth movie) to dance the Dance of the Seven Veils for the Tetrarch, who has promised her any
favor in return. Salami thinks the favor will be St. Bernard's release, but bad
old Herodias asks for his head on a silver salver instead. What a plot! At
least, that's what was supposed to have happened, but at the point when there Was to have been the big scene between the Antipastos, man and wife, a ballet of the slave girls was interpolated. Pluto was gesturing
frantically for me to come backstage. Excusing myself to Frangle, Quilty, and
the Reverend Captain, I left my front-row-center seat and went to see what was
amiss.
"Herod
has deserted!" Clea announced in dire tone, exhibiting the castoff
costume. "He couldn't wait to run off to Needlepoint Hill with the
Egyptians."
"Are
all the pets gone now?" I asked. Unnecessarily, for I could see the steady
streams of prisoners still hurrying out the gate under the supervision of
Palmino and his four friends—who had volunteered to miss the stage show and man
the lookout towers that night. Many of the pets ran right from the wings into
the departing throng as soon as their business on stage was completed.
"Only
six thousand are out," Pluto confessed. "We're ten minutes behind
schedule because of the late curtain, but we're catching up. The problem is
Herod. We forgot to assign an understudy, and nobody knows the part."
"Somebody
has to go on—that much is obvious. I don't care who you pick."
"We
thought. . . ." St. Bernard began hesitatingly. . . . that
you might."
"You
see, my darling, the other pets really have no idea of what we're about,"
Clea explained. "It's easy enough for the girls to go out there and do a
litde belly dance, but the actor doing Herod was beside himself with the pain
of the vulgarity. And we thought that since you've come to know
the Dingoes so well. . . ."
"But they've come to know me so well tool"
"But
with this big tummy and the false moustache and a putty nose and a little rouge
and mascara, they won't. Please, White Fang, don't be
difficult. We can't make those poor slave girls dance all night." Clea
took advantage of the time to prepare me for the role, and by the end of her entreaty
I was more fit to go on as Herod than to return to my
seat in front, so I gave in. Besides, as Pluto had known very well, I love
amateur theatricals.
My
first scene, with Herodias, was easy to ad-lib. The bargain was struck by
which Salami was to do her bit and St. Bernard was to have his head taken off.
Then I settled back to watch, having no other business during the dance than to
scramble out on all fours and pick up each of the seven veils as Motherlove let
them fall, then bay like a wolf in appreciation. In all fairness I must say
that her dance merited no less.
The
first veil, for instance, revealed Motherlove's arms— as graceful and ivory a
pair as ever clasped a Tetrarch's neck, hands like two doves, tipped with long
almond nails that even the cruel regimen of prison life had not spoiled.
The
second veil uncovered Motherlove's classic nose and sculpted hps, parted, as
the veil fell, in a taunting and suggestive smile, more exciting than many
another woman's kiss.
Motherlove
spent as much time over the third veil as if she had been undoing the Gordian
knot, and, when it at least fell, the audience and I broke into a roar of
approval. Motherlove's legs were long, firm, and elegantly muscled. When they
moved in time to the crash of the cymbals and squeal of strings, one seemed to
feel that the science of anatomy held no more mysteries. Such a feeling, however,
was premature.
The
orchestra had grown steadily quieter throughout the dance, the tempo slower. As
each veil fell, a group of musicians quit their seats at the side of the stage
and went behind the backdrop where they joined the escaping throng. The noise
of the exodus became perceptible as the music quietened, but Motherlove
commanded the guards' attention with queenly authority, to say the least.
The
fourth veil bared her swanlike neck and creamy shoulders to the vulgar view;
the fifth revealed her midriff. The lithe bare belly rolled and pulled taut,
then stretched out at length, making the delicately-convoluted navel peek forth
from its little hollow of flesh. The arms moved violently with the music,
clapping, swinging up above the high-piled hair and chopping down in
counterpoint to the musician's beat. The music slowed to the consistency of
honey. Motherlove's almond fingers touched the hem of the sixth veil.
"Take
it off!" the guards chanted. "Take it off! Take it off!" The
Tetrarch was limping in circles about the stage, while Captain Frangle had
leapt to his feet and was chewing at his moustaches in an agony of
concupiscence. Eventually, after a long season of doubt, she took it off. Ah,
then what treasures did the Tetrarch's court behold! The two breasts were like
two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
One
veil remained, and one musician—Pluto, who played a flute. Motherlove loosened
the knot at her hip, but she did not let the veil drop. She lifted it, she
lowered it, she moved it laterally—but she did not let it drop. Of a sudden the
flute broke off, and Pluto stepped forward to resume his role as narrator.
"And behold . . ." he sang out.
Behold! Behold!" the audience shouted in
agreement.
". . . the
Baptist broke from his bonds and escaped the dungeon of the Tetrarch, and he
was at hand to spare the modesty of the Princess Salami from the lustful gaze
of Herod." St. Bernard carried in a heavy wooden screen, which unfolded
into six sections. The Princess Salami concealed herself modestly behind this
screen, one end of which butted against the wing on stage left.
"Off with his
head!" I, as the Tetrarch, roared.
"Off
with his head!" the audience clamored. One of them, Frangle himself,
favoring more direct action, rushed at the screen to tear it down. St. Bernard
ran downstage to prevent him but tripped over his own loincloth. Only I, Herod
Antipasto, could stay Frangle's lewd intent.
Grasping
him roughly by the lapels of his uniform, I began dragging him back to his
seat, but Frangle was not to be persuaded even by superior strength. He bit and
clawed and tore and grabbed at Herod's moustaches. . . .
"Major
Worthington!" he exclaimed. "What are you about?"
Fortunately
the audience was making enough noise to drown out Frangle's cry of recognition.
St. Bernard assisted me in dragging the Captain behind the screen, and together
we assisted the Captain to become unconscious. As each of the articles of his
clothing was thrown out from behind the screen for their inspection, the
guards* laughter grew louder. At last, when the inert officer was carried away
in full sight on a stretcher the house came down.
Which
bit of extempore business concluded, we returned with relief to the script.
"Desist,
villainous Antipasto!" declaimed St. Bernard, in his best Verdian style.
"Nay,
prepare to meet thy death, fool," I replied, "for
I shall see the precious ruby beneath that final veil or die in the
attempt."
"Help,
help," said Clea peeking out from behind the screen.
"Off
with his head!" the guards began again to chant, drowning out the noise
that the last pets were making in their escape.
I whipped out the tipped fencing foil from
the sheathe at my side and laid on. Though my
swordsmanship was no better than might have been expected from a bumbling, fat,
old Tetrarch, luck was so far on my side that St. Bernard was unable to
despatch me with the same ease with which he'd disposed of the previous three
hundred soldiers. Then, by a clever strategem, I made him circle about so that
I was between him and the screen. Then I bolted towards Salami. With a shreik
Clea started running away, pressing her single remaining veil (rather larger
now than it had been) to her bosom and private parts. She was hindered from
running too far ahead of me by the fact that the tip of my foil had become
tangled in the corner of this garment. In this manner we circled the courtyard
thrice, pursued by St. Bernard, who was still tripping over his loincloth and
therefore could never quite catch up. The credit for all this choreography must
go to Pluto.
At last Motherlove regained the sanctuary of
the screen. A mist comes before my eyes and my throat tightens as I am forced
again to recall the sight of my mother's cheerful smile and the friendly wave
of her hand as she departed into the wings, and thence backstage. Her role was
at an end, and she was to follow the rest of the pets now to Needlepoint Hill.
Never, never more to see her I How
lovely she was in those last moments! How hard to believe that she has left the
Earth and me irredeemably behind!
But
there was not time then to appreciate the ineffable-ness of that moment, for
St. Bernard was laying on thick and fast, switching my
padded sides and rump with his lath broadsword. Howling inanely and flailing my
foil, I ran about the stage. After a few circuits thus, I ran out at the wings stage left and circled the backdrop that I might reenter
on the right. Only Palmino and his four cohorts were left backstage now. The
pets were all out. It lacked but fifteen minutes of midnight.
Around the courtyard, back and forth across
the stage, then a quick dash behind the screen (where the audience still
supposed Clea to be cowering) to catch hold of one end of a trick
"veil," which when pulled out to its full length exceeded the
measurements of the stage twice over. But the jokes were wearing thin. Our
audience was demanding St. Bernard's head ever more loudly. Hugger-mugger can
only go so far.
Then
St. Bernard, hoping to liven the performance, struck
me one blow that didn't land on the padding but on me. With a cry of authentic pain, I tumbled backward into Herod's Palace. Samson,
in the house of the Philistines, did not enjoy so instant a success. Tremors
passed through the eclectic canvas, and there was a minatory, splitting sound.
St. Bernard pulled me away before it all came down on my head.
Like
the rending of the temple veil, Herod's Palace split neatly down the central
seam and fell to the right and to the left, leaving in full view the gaping
gates through which the pets had departed. But they did not gape quite so much
as I would have liked, and they gaped less every second, as Palmino and his
four companions pushed them closed. Pluto's plan had called for the gate to be
closed and locked, but only after St. Bernard and I were
outside. We rushed forward too late to prevent the outer bolt from sliding into
place. Palmino had double-crossed us.
The
guards that had comprised the audience of Salami did not take in the full
extent of the deception that had been perpetrated upon them quickly enough to
prevent St. Bernard and me from dashing to the barracks' door. When they did
realize that all the other pets had escaped out the gate, the main body of them
forgot the two of us entirely and battered at the locked portal. A contingent
of five, however, did pursue us into the barracks and challenged us to stop.
Since they were off duty and unarmed, we could afford to ignore their
challenge.
It would have been an easy matter then to go
up the stairs to Mosely's room and out the unbarred window and on up to
Needlepoint Hill, except that—unfortunately—I tripped.
The
five guards were all over me, but St. Bernard flew to my rescue and beat them
back with his stick of lath. Which, however, broke off at the
hilt. Scrambling to my feet, I tore off my putty nose and false
moustaches and ordered the guards to come to attention. "If you dare lift
your hand a-gainst me, I'll have you court-martialed!" "Jesus Christ,
it's the Major!"
They
stood uncertain whether to advance upon us or obey my command, allowing St.
Bernard opportunity to pick up a packed foot locker from beside one of the
bunks and to hurl it at them. Bonk! Oof! Thud! Great Scott!
We
rushed up the stairs and into Mosely's room. St. Bernard was out at the window
almost the moment he was in at the door, and I would have followed as quickly
after, but for my costume. I was stuffed too abundantly to go through.
"Hurry!" St. Bernard warned, pointing to the distant figures of the last pets
gathering around Needlepoint Hill, about which a nimbus of roseate light seemed
to be settling. "The Masters are there now."
I
had taken off half my uniform extricating myself from my costume, and I was out
on the windowledge. Too late! All about us were the armies of the Dingoes!
The
soldiers closed in around St. Bernard, and I threw him my foil for his defense.
He warred against their electric prods bravely, but it was a hopeless contest
from the first. The guards of the penitentiary were pounding on the door at my
back.
An
officer, his arm in a sling (the original Major Worthing-tonP), addressed me
through a megaphone. "Better jump down from that ledge, White Fang. We
have orders to take you alive. The guards in that prison do not."
In the distance, on the crest of Needlepoint
Hill, the first of the redeemed pets began ascending into the skies. Soon the
heavens were filled with their glorious, glowing bodies. A golden light of
overwhelming beauty flooded the scene so that even the Dingo soldiers had to
turn to admire it. It reminded me of . . . something . . . something I could
not, quite, put my finger on.
St. Bernard could, however: "The Last
Judgment!"
The Masters were taking back their pets in
exactly the manner that Michelangelo had laid out for them six centuries before
on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.
The door gave behind me, and I jumped into
captivity.
CHAPTER 10:
In
which an execution is executed, followed by a controversy.
The
scene is the
prison of the Dingoes—not the teeming, raucous tumble of St. Cloud (which had
been, for all its squalor and inspissated misery, redeemed by the sheer bulk of
the humanity packed within its walls)—not that, but a high and solitary
chamber, aseptically white, odorless, soundless, sightless, boding. I say solitary, but I was not alone. St. Bernard was confined
in the same cell with me, but his state so mirrored my own that his
companionship merely deepened my sense of being cut off, alone, doomed. Had
there been a throng in that room with us, it would have been just the same—for
in the courts of death all men are alone. Friends never come to stand beside a
gallows. The gallows. . . .
No,
let me for a while yet skirt that subject. Let's talk about. . . .
St. Bernard. St. Bernard was even more cast down than I.
At least, his gloom was more tangible. Losing first the support of his Leash
and then the solace of his beloved Clea (and the latter, through the agency of
the contemnible Dingoes), his will had become de-elasticized. He no longer
reacted against his environment; he did not plan new escapes; he didn't even
sing.
My only diversion from anxious speculation
(and I shall leave it to my readers' imagination to develop the subject that
preoccupied me) was looking down from the cell's single window at the
semi-deserted streets below. The fivefold gallows in the foreground, though it
did not inspire confidence, identified our prison as the St. Paul Courthouse
that my guard on the airplane had referred to so admiringly. The platform of
the gallows was raised a dozen feet above street-level, and the main shaft that
supported the cross-trees. . . .
Well
return to that subject. For now, let us focus our attention on the prospect
beyond the gallows. All day long, civilian Dingoes passed by the Courthouse—the
women in long, ungainly dresses and the men in unseasonably heavy suits—but
their behavior was so unremittingly dull (mostly, they just marched,
left-right, left-right, left-right, in long, slow, straight lines) that I soon
grew tired of observing them and began instead to count the cars that went by.
This
wasn't so boring as you might think, for the various trucks, jeeps, and
tractors still in use among the Dingoes (rarely, if ever, did one see an
ordinary car) presented a beautiful study in comparative ruination. Roaring and
sputtering, spewing out black clouds of noxious gas, bouncing along the
potholed road at their top speed of fifteen miles per hour, the procession of
antique machines was worthy of the genius of Rintintin. (For those unacquainted
with his work, an explanation: Rintintin of Eros is the greatest contemporary
sculptor of mechanism. I was present at the premier—and only—performance of the
reknowned "Death of a Helicopter," an event that I shall always
treasure in my memory and which I would describe at length except for the fear
that it would be out of keeping at this moment.)
These
machines were usually of an official nature, and those same insignia that I had
seen scrawled on the telephone poles outside of Shroeder were painted on the
sides of the trucks or on banners that streamed from the jeeps' antennae. I was
reminded of the heraldic devices of some crusading army: Resistor statant,
sable on a field of gules; diode dormant on a quartered field, ermine and
vert.
I
would also give a little account of the architecture of the Dingoes, but the
truth is I didn't pay it much attention.
Most of the time I looked at the gallows. The architecture of a gallows is very
simple.
After two days in this limbo, I received my
first visitor. It was Julie, but a Julie so altered in appearance that I
thought at first she was a Dingo spy in disguise. (Prison does develop one's
paranoid tendencies.) She was wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length
dress in the Dingo style and her beautiful hair was concealed by an ungainly cork
helmet such as I had seen on several persons passing below my window.
"Julie I" I exclaimed. "What have they done to you?"
"I've
been repatriated." She wasn't able to raise her eyes to look into mine,
and her whole manner was one of unnatural constraint. No doubt, this could be
accounted for by the presence of the armed guard who was watching us from the
open doorway.
"You mean they've
forced you to. . . .**
"Nobody's forced me to do anything. I
just decided to become a Dingo. They're really much nicer than we thought
they'd be. They're not all like Bruno. And even he's not so bad once you
get to know him."
"My God, Julie! Have you no shame?"
"Oh,
don't be upset. That's not what I meant. Bruno's too much in love with Roxanna
to think of bothering me. Besides, he's still laid up in a hospital bed."
"That isn't what I
meant."
But
Julie went blithely on. "They're going to get married as soon as he's out
of the hospital. Isn't that wonderful? On the airplane coming here, after you
jumped out and deserted
me, Bruno was delirious and
he told me all about himself. I can't say I understood much of it. But do you
realize that he actually likes you?
He does. There he was all bandaged up, lying on the stretcher,
and all of us thinking the plane was going to crash any minute, and he said: T
wasn't smashed like that since God knows when. Good man! We'll get along —White
Fang and me.' I thought it was just the delirium, but he was serious. He wants
you to visit him and Roxanna as soon as you can. I explained that that might
not be soon."
"If
at all."
"That's
what Roxanna suggested. And she didn't seem at all upset by the idea. She's
still very angry with you for hurting Bruno."
"But I was trying to protect herl"
The
story that Julie at last unfolded, in her rather scattery way, was this:
Roxanna, when she had seen me strike Bruno with the axe, suddenly was made
aware that she was in love with her tormentor. Her new-found love was every bit
as passionate as the hatred she had expressed only minutes before. In the heat
of the moment, she had been almost angry enough to use my axe on me, but Julie
and the Dingoes who had been drawn to the scene had been able to stop her.
Since then she had pursued her vengeance more deviously.
"And Petite," I
asked, "what did she do to Petite?"
"Oh,
it wasn't at all what I'd feared. She just read to her from this
propaganda-book that all the Dingoes like. It's called The Life of Man. She convinced Petite that it's very naughty
to be a pet, but the first thing Petite asked when she
saw me again was 'Where's my Leash?' She can't adjust to the idea that she'll
never have it again."
"Julie,
don't say that. Of course she'll have it again. V/e all will. Haven't you heard
about Needlepoint Hill? Pluto and Clea are probably already back
on Swan Lake or Titan, and in one week more, or two weeks. . . ."
The
mention of his home brought a profound groan from the lips of St. Bernard: "Gottl welch Dunkel hier!"
Julie pressed her forefinger to her lips
anxiously. "Hush! We aren't allowed to mention that. It's a sore point
with the Dingoes."
"What are they going
to do with us, Julie?" I whispered.
She
shook her head sadly, avoiding my intent gaze. "I can't talk about
that," she said. "They forbade it. And anyhow, I don't know."
Somehow, though, I didn't believe her.
Julie spent the rest of her visit trying to
justify the haste with which she had allowed the Dingoes to repatriate her, and
since she had no apparent excuse but expediency, it was rather hard going.
At
last I interrupted her: "Julie, please don't take on about it. I quite
understand that you've had to disassociate yourself from me. Heaven only knows
what they intend to do with me, but there's no reason for you needlessly sharing
in that fate. Perhaps they mean to use me as a hostage; perhaps they mean
something worse. In either case you're lucky to be rid of me." I was just
beginning to hit my stride, and I would soon have brought myself to the point
of tears, when Julie started to giggle.
To
giggle! She tittered and snorted and snuffled like someone who can't keep a
joke, and she left the room bent double with the pain of holding back her
laughter.
Hysteria, of course. It was a very sad thing to see the girl you love in such a condition
and to be unable to help. But I didn't think too long about that, since it was
even sadder to think of me in my condition.
Shortly
after Julie left, a guard came to our cell to ask what we would like for our
last meal.
It was sundown, and from the windows of the
cell I could see that a large crowd of spectators had already gathered about
the base of the gallows. At ten o'clock a guard came to remove the two trays of
untouched food (he wolfed down the choicest bits of the steak before he went
out into the corridor), and then a chaplain informed us apathetically that we
could confess to him if we wished.
"I
only confess to my Master, thank you," St. Bernard informed him. Now that
the ceremony of our execution was well under way St. Bernard was able to pull
himself together: he knew the role he was expected to play.
Our
cell began to fill with guards. I was commanded to come away from the window,
and my hands were bound behind my back. St. Bernard submitted to his bonds
peacefully.
"I'm sorry that you find yourself in this
situation on my account, St. Bernard. I didn't want it to end this way— for
either of us."
"Shaddup!"
said the guard. "You ain't supposed to talk any more."
St. Bernard smiled. "Oh, there's no need
for you to be sorry, Bruderlein.
For my own part, I have but one regret: I regret that I have but one life to give
for the Mastery."
"Shaddup
you!
Whyntya shaddup when I say shaddup?"
We
were escorted by some dozen Dingoes to the main entrance of the courthouse,
where we were met by the officer in charge of this execution. He bowed to us
curtly and smiled a thin—but not unhappy—smile.
"Lieutenant
Mosely!" I
exclaimed. 'What a surprise, sir!"
Without,
a solemn tattoo was begun, the doors were swung open, and the crowd screamed
its approbation.
"Now,"
St. Bernard shouted above the din, "more than ever does it seem rich to
die."
Despite
this noble affirmation he seemed no more eager than I to mount the thirteen
steps to the gallows. We were stationed in our places—each in the middle of a
rectangle distinctly demarcated from the other boards of the platform. When I jiggled my weight, I could feel the trapdoor wobble. On the whole, I
stood very still.
The
chaplain approached us a last time. "Did you wish to make a last
statement?"
"Yes,"
said St. Bernard. "I know not what course others may choose, but as for
myself—Give me liberty or give me death!"
"And you?"
"I'm
willing to compromise. Give me something somewhere in between. How about a stay
of execution? How about a trial? I'm being denied my rights as a United States
citizen!"
"God damn the United States!" St. Bernard
cried. "I hope that I may
never see nor hear of the United States again!"
"What
a terrible thing to say!" the chaplain scolded.
"It would serve you right if that's just what happened to you."
It was not, however, to be
St. Bernard's fate, for the band assembled in front of the gallows chose that
moment to strike up the National Anthem. The men in the crowd took off their
caps, and the women quieted. St. Bernard sang the words aloud in his wonderful
tenor voice. It was a rare last opportunity.
Lieutenant
Mosely came forward and offered blindfolds. I refused, but St. Bernard accepted
gratefully. With the black cloth over his eyes, he looked handsomer and more
pathetic than ever. There was an ominous silence, interrupted by a rapturous
outburst from one of the Dingo women in the front row of spectators: "Cut
off their balls I Cut off their balls first!"
Pursing
my lips at this demonstration of poor taste, I glanced down at the bloodthirsty
creature who had expressed these sentiments—and imagine my surprise when I saw
she was the same woman who had showered me with flowers and kisses during the
parade in Duluth! Perhaps I was mistaken though; perhaps she was only of the
same physical type. A guard hushed her before the last riffle of drums.
Mosely lifted his hand.
St.
Bernard rose to the occasion: "It is a far, far better thing that I do,
than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."
Mosely lowered his right
hand.
St. Bernard dropped.
"But what about me?" I asked, even as the tears of pity rolled
down my cheeks. Poor, poor St. Bernard!
'You've
got your stay of execution," Mosely informed me glumly. "There's
someone who wants to see you first. You're going there now."
"Fine—but would you take the noose off
first? Ah, that's much better."
I could not see where the limousine was
taking me, for the curtains were drawn about all the windows in the back seat,
but within minutes I found myself in a large and largely vacant underground
parking area. Then, after a labyrinth of staircases, corridors, guards, and
passwords, I was at last left alone before an imposing mahogany desk. The desk
and all the appointments of the room testified to the consequence of their
possessor. In a subsistence economy like the Dingoes', luxury is a potent
symbol.
My
attention was especially drawn to the portrait that hung over the desk. Done in
the mock-primitive style popular in the sixties of the last century, it slyly
exaggerated those features of the subject which were most suggestive of the raw
and barbarous. His stomach, though monumental in itself, was seen from a
perspective that magnified its bulk. The face was crudely colored, particularly
the nose, which was a florid, alcoholic crimson. The violet-tinged lips were at
once cynical and voluptuary. The picture was the perfect archetype of the
Dingo.
Yet
perhaps not perfect—for the eyes shone with an intelligence and good will that
seemed to contradict the overall impression of brutishness. This one dissonance
added to the archetype that touch of individual fife
which only the best portraitists have ever been able to achieve.
I
was still engaged in studying this painting (and, really, it had the strangest
fascination for me) when its original stepped into the room and came forward to
shake my hand.
"Sorry
to have kept you waiting, but my time hasn't been my own ever since that damned
sunspot."
When
he had left off shaking my hand, he did not immediately release it, but,
keeping it still tightiy clasped, looked me over appraisingly.
"You'll
have to get rid of that name of yours, you know. 'White
Fang' just won't do now. We Dingoes—as you call us—don't like those doggish
names. Your proper name is Dennis White, isn't it? Well, Dennis, welcome to the
revolution,"
"Thank you, but. . . ."
"But
who am I? I'm the Grand High Diode. As far as you're concerned, you may think
of me as a vice-president. The Diode is second only to the Cathode Himself. Are
you interested in politics?"
"Pets don't have to be. We're
free."
"Ah, freedom I" The Grand High
Diode made an expansive gesture, then plopped into
the seat behind the desk. Tour Master takes care of everything for you and
leaves you so perfectly free. Except that you can't taste anything from the
good-and-evil tree, why there's nothing that isn't allowed you.
He
glowered at me dramatically, and I had time to compare the portrait with the
portrayed. Even the man's wild, white locks seemed to be tumbled about his head
according to the same formula that the painter had used to guide his
brushstrokes. My admiration for him (the painter, not the portrayed) grew by
leaps and bounds.
"The
Masters appeared two-thirds of a century
ago. In that time human
civilization has virtually
disappeared. Our political institutions are in a shambles; our economy is
little more than bartering now; there are practically no artists left."
"Among you Dingoes, perhaps not. But under the Mastery, civilization is
flourishing as never before in man's history. If you're going to talk about
dvilization, the Dingoes haven't a leg
to stand on."
"Cows were never more civilized than
when we bred them."
I smiled. "Word-games.
But I can play them just as well." "If you'd rather not argue. . .
."
"I'd
rather argue. I'd rather do anything that keeps me
from returning to the gallows. It was a most distasteful experience."
"Perhaps
you can avoid the gallows altogether. Perhaps, Dennis, I can convince you to
become a Dingo?" The man's thick, violet hps
distended in a wolfish grin. His eyes, which were, like the
eyes in the portrait, vivid with intelligence, glittered with a strange sort of
mirth.
I
tried my best to temper my natural disdain with a quaver of doubt. "Isn't
it rather late to join? I should think that most of the carnage must be over by
now. Aren't you nearly ready for defeat?"
"We'll probably be
defeated, but a good revolutionary can't let that worry him. A battle that isn't against the odds would hardly be a battle
at all. The carnage, I'll admit, is unfortunate."
"And unjustifiable as well. Poor St. Bernard had done nothing to
justify—"
"Then
I won't bother to justify it. Dirty hands is one of the
prices you pay in becoming a man again."
"Are
you fighting this revolution just so you can feel guilty about it?^
"For that—and for the chance to be our own Masters. Guilt and sweat and black bread are all part
of being human. Domestic animals are always bred to the point that they become
helpless in the state of nature. The Masters have been breeding men."
"And doing a better job of it than man ever did. Look at the results."
"That,
I might point out, is exactly the view a dachshund would take."
"Then
let me put in a good word for dachshunds. I prefer them to wolves. I prefer
them to Dingoes."
"Do
you? Don't make up your
mind too quickly—or it may cost you your head." And, with this threat, my
incredible inquisitor began to chuckle. His chuckle became a pronounced laugh,
and the laugh grew to a roar. It occurred to me that the gleam in his eyes
might as well have been madness as intelligence.
Suddenly
I was overcome by a desire just to have done. "My mind is made up," I
announced calmly, when he had stopped laughing.
"Then
you'll make a declaration?" Apparently, he had taken the exact opposite of
the meaning I had intended.
"Why
should you care which side I'm on?" I demanded angrily.
"Because a statement from you—from the
son of Tennyson White—with the strength of that name behind it—would
be*invaluable in the cause of freedom."
Very deliberately I approached the mahogany
desk where the man was sitting, wreathed in a fatuous smile, and very
deliberately I raised my hand and struck him full in the face.
Instantly
the room was filled with guards who pinioned my arms behind my back. The man
behind the desk began, again, to chuckle.
"You beast!" I shouted. "You Dingo! You have the conscience
to kidnap and murder my father, and then you dare ask me to make you a declaration of support. I can't believe
.... If you
think that. ..." I went
on raving in this vein for some little while. And as I raved that incredible
man lay sprawled on the top of his desk and laughed until he had lost his
breath.
"White
Fang," he managed at last to say. "That is to say—Dennis, my dear
boy, excuse me. Perhaps I've carried this a little too far. But you see. . .
." And now he swept aside the thick white locks from the stub of his right ear.
. . I am your father and not murdered in the
least."
CHAPTER
11:
In which I commit myself to the Philosophy of Dingoism.
The
next week went
by at a pace that would have been nightmarish if I hadn't been so giddily,
busily happy. First off, I married Julie once again—this time in accordance
with the rites of the Dingoes. Daddy explained that in some matters—marriage
most especially—the Dingoes could be as great sticklers for ceremony as my
brother Pluto. Darling, Julie entered into the spirit of things with
enthusiastic atavism, and I suspect now that part of Daddy's insistence had
had its origin in my once-again-newlywed bride. Still, it was a well-wrought
ceremony, which even Pluto might have approved. Hymen's candle never burned
brighter than on the day that our hands were joined over the glowing vacuum
tube on the altar of die renovated power station.
We had our first quarrel as newlyweds an hour
afterward, when Julie told me that she'd known about Daddy and the ordeal he
was preparing for me on the day she had come to visit me in the courthouse
jail. But the quarrel ended as soon as Julie had pointed out that, since I'd
passed the test so well, I had no cause for anger. I hate to think what might
have happened however, if I'd agreed to make the "declaration" that
Daddy had proposed.
The moment I had dreaded most—when I should have to inform Daddy that
the pet who had been executed with me was also his son—passed by without
ruffling his considerable equanimity. He had known all the while, through Julie,
and he had gone right ahead and ordered the execution, in order, so he claimed,
to set me a sobering example of man's mortality and the likely price of
rebellion.
"But your own son!" I protested. "What bond is stronger
than between father and son?"
"Yes,
I'm sure that's all very true—though that bond is somewhat attentuated when one
has had hundreds of sons. But consider, Dennis—he was committing incest. So,
even exclusive of his political crimes, which are great. . . ."
"Daddy—you're
smiling that certain way again. I suspect there's a trick up your sleeve."
"Come see a movie, Dennis. If I told
you, you wouldn't, perhaps, believe."
The
film showed four pallbearers (by their physiques and nakedness one could tell
they were pets) supporting a pallet upon which the corpse of St. Bernard had
been composed. They were climbing the twisty path to Needlepoint Hill. Reaching
the summit, they laid down their burden and watched as a nimbus of golden fight
formed above the dead body: St. Bernard's Master had been summoned back to the
hill.
The fingers trembled—and there is nothing to
which I can compare the beauty of that moment unless it be
the "Creation of Adam" panel in the Sistine Chapel—the eyelids fluttered
(telephoto lens now) and opened. St. Bernard, gloriously resurrected, began to
sing Beethoven's Ninth. Then, slowly, the five bodies rose into the air,
caroling their joy. With such a happy ending, I couldn't hold the charade of
the execution against Daddy.
From
the first, Julie and I were celebrities among the Dingoes. At a steady
succession of lunches, dinners, and dances, we played the parts of refugees
from the "tyranny of the Masters, grateful for this new-found
freedom." That's a quote from the speech that Daddy wrote for me to
deliver on such occasions. It always draws applause. Dingoes have no taste.
While
I acted my role as a model revolutionary, I carried on another drama inwardly.
Had it been merely a contest between filial piety and my loyalty to the
Masters, I would not have hesitated long, for filial piety is negligible when
for seventeen years one has presumed one's father dead.
But
mine had been no ordinary father. He had been Tennyson White, and he had
written A Dog's
Life. Now I discovered
there was a sequel to that book.
I
read through The
Life of Man in
one sitting of fifteen hours' duration. It was one of the most shattering experiences
of my life. In fact, right at this moment, I can't remember any others
comparable.
Anyone
who's read it realizes the difficulty one faces trying to describe The Life of Man. It's got a little of everything: satire,
polemic, melodrama, farce. After the classic unity of A Dog's Life, the sequel strikes at one's sensibilities
like a jet of water from a high-pressure hose. It begins with the same high and
dry irony, the same subdued wit, but gradually—it's hard to say just when—the
viewpoint shifts. Scenes from the first novel are repeated verbatim, but now its pleasantries have become horrors.
Allegory gives way to a brutal, damning realism, and every word of it seemed an
accusation aimed direcdy at me. After the first reading, I had no more distinct
memory of it than I would have had a hammer blow. And so I entirely overlooked
the fact that The
Life of Man is
autobiography from first to last.
As I have earlier noted, my father Tennyson
White belonged to the first generation of humans to grow up away from the
planet Earth. He had had an exemplary upbringing on Ceres; then, when it was
discovered he had leukemia, he was relegated to a second-rate Earthside
hospital while the Masters argued the "sporting proposition" of his
fate. It was then that he lost his faith in the Mastery, and it was then that
he drew up the outlines for both his
great novels. It was then too that Daddy contacted the leaders of the Dingoes
and mapped out with their aid a program for revolution. A Dog's Life was to be the overture to that program.
Many
authors have been accused of corrupting youth and debasing the moral coinage of
their times. Probably none has ever set about so deliberately as Daddy. His
novel was a time-bomb disguised as an Easter egg and planted right in the
middle of the Master's basket; it was a Trojan horse; it was a slow-working
acid that nibbled at the minds of the pets-just a mild, aesthetic tickle at
first, then it worked in deeper, an abrasive that scarred them with guilt. For
men, in the last analysis, are not meant to be domestic animals.
Those
who stood the acid-test of that novel managed to escape to Earth and join the
Dingoes (feigning, like Daddy, to having been butchered). Those who didn't (and
sadly, these were by far the majority) stayed with the Masters and incorporated
the monstrous satire of A
Dog's Life into
the fabric of their daily lives. They became dogs.
A
decade after the publication of A Dog's Life, Daddy
effected his own escape to Earth. He managed to prevent the Master of Ganymede
from realizing his intentions, then or later, by deliberately jumbling his true
feelings and firm purpose among the welter of fictional ideas that were forever
teeming in his fertile fancy. He further deceived his Master by surrounding
this "plot" with such lustreless or unpleasant images (the ear, for
instance) that his Master never encouraged him to cultivate this train of
thought—nor examined it himself with more than cursory attention.
Daddy's
autobiography makes no mention of the fact that he left his two sons (to
mention only Pluto and me) behind when he went over to the Dingoes, and he
refuses to talk about it still. I have always suspected that he doubted, if
only slightly, whether he was doing the right thing in leaving the Masters. It
was a large enough doubt that he was willing to let
us decide for ourselves whether we wished to become
Dingoes or remain Leashed.
In
2024 Earth was swarming with refugees from the Mastery, and the revolutionary
movement—the Revolutionary Inductance Corps, or RIC—was getting on its feet.
(Naturally, the Dingoes
didn't call themselves
'Dingoes.') Daddy's next task was more difficult, for he had to forge an army
from the unorganized mass of apathetic Dingoes who had never left Earth. The Life of Man accomplished part of this purpose, for it
showed the Dingoes what they were: an amorphous mass of discontent, without
program or purpose; a race that had taken the first step towards
its own extinction.
But
the Dingoes were not such novel-readers as the pets. Only the more thoughtful
read this second novel—and they didn't need to. Daddy gradually came to see
that no amount of literature would spark the tinder of the Dingoes into a revolutionary firebrand.
And so it was—and now we leave Daddy's
autobiography and enter the sphere of raw history—that my father invented a mythology.
The Dingoes were ripe for one. Ever since the
first Manifestation in the "70's, organized religion had become quite disorganized.
The Masters bore too close a resemblance to mankind's favorite gods, and men
of religious or mystical sensibilities were among the fust
to volunteer for the kennels, where they could contemplate the
very-nearly-divine nature of the Masters without any of the usual discomforts
of the ascetic life. The Dingoes, on the other hand, found it difficult to
venerate gods who so much resembled their sworn enemies.
Daddy
realized that under these conditions the Dingoes might accept a
"religion" of demonology and sympathetic magic. When the gods are malign, men turn to jujus and totems.
But wax dolls and devil
masks would no longer do, for the first law of sympathetic magic is that
"Like produces like." The Masters were electromagnetic phenomena:
then what better talisman than a dry cell? In any elementary physics text,
there was a wealth of arcane lore, hieratic symbols, and even battle cries.
Children were taught Kirchofi's laws in their cradles, and revolutionaries wore
cork helmets to ward off the Masters—since cork was a good insulator. It was
nonsense, but it was effective nonsense. The Revolutionary Inductance Corps won
an overwhelming majority in the council of the Dingoes on the slogan: ELECT
RIC. Daddy became Diode in the revolutionary government, next in authority to
the High Cathode himself. Everyone was ready to begin the revolution, and no
one had the least idea how to go about it.
Which goes to show that it's good to be prepared, because that was when
the providential sunspot short-circuited the Masters. The leaders of the Dingoes had managed to
take credit for their own good luck, but now a month had passed since S-Day,
and gradually the Masters were reasserting their old claims to dominion.
Electric light and power was back on (though the Dingoes refused to use it);
the kennels were back in place beneath their force-field domes; the captured
pets were being systematically repossessed, the most imposing demonstration of
this having been the massive escape from Needlepoint Hill. In a very short
time the Mastery would be established stronger than ever, unless the Dingoes
found a way to stop them.
Cork
helmets may be good for morale, but in a real contest I'd as soon defend
myself with a popgun. If the Dingoes had made any serious plans, Daddy wasn't
telling me about them.
Daddy,
Julie, and I had been waiting in the lobby of the St. Paul Hotel for fifteen
minutes, and in all that time we hadn't seen one room clerk or bellboy. There
weren't even any guests, for Earth had become so depopulated during the Mastery
that a roof and a bed were always easy to come by.
What you couldn't find anywhere was labor. Even the best hotels and restaurants
were self-service.
Finally
Bruno and Rocky (for this had come to seem a better name for her than Roxanna)
finished dressing and came down to the lobby. Bruno was wearing an un-pressed
cotton suit and a bowling shirt open at the neck, so that a little bit of the
bandage about his chest peeped out. Rocky was dressed to kill; Darling, Julie
looked as staid as a nun by comparison. But when you're only twenty years old
you don't have to try as hard as when you're thirty-eight.
We
exchanged pleasantries, decided on a restaurant, and went out to Daddy's
car—and thus began the ghastliest evening of my life.
Bruno was returning to his post in Duluth the
next day, and we'd been unable to put him off any longer. For weeks he'd been
insisting that the five of us—the two Schwartzkopfs and the three Whites—"make
a night of it." I felt guilty toward Bruno, and at that time I hadn't yet
learned to live with a guilty conscience. I gave in.
I
should have been suspicious of overtures of friendship from a man I'd nearly
murdered, or I might have simply supposed that, like most Dingoes, Bruno was
chiefly interested in making my father's acquaintance. However, his first
overture had come before he knew my father was Tennyson White, and so it was
hard to doubt his sincerity. I decided that he was only mad.
If I felt guilty and awkward toward Bruno, I
can't imagine how Rocky felt toward me. When she revealed my identity to the
Dingoes, she couldn't have known that my father was the second-in-command of
their forces—not, as she had supposed, their arch-enemy. Only initiated members
of the RIC knew who their leaders were, and his novel, The Life of
Man, which had won her
over to the Dingo viewpoint (to the degree that Bruno hadn't accomplished this
purpose), had been published pseudonymously. She had intended to see me
executed; instead she had saved my life. Now we were sitting next to each other
in the back seat of Daddy's limousine, talking about old times. When we got
out, she managed to bring her spiked heel down on my instep with lethal
accuracy, and once, in the middle of dinner, smiling brightly and chattering
all the while, she kicked me square in the shin, underneath the tablecloth.
The
meal wouldn't have gone beyond the main course if it hadn't been that almost
all of Rocky's remarks went over Bruno's head. He was dauntlessly ebullient,
and when he started to talk, he could go on indefinitely. To shut off Rocky
(who couldn't hear enough about our wedding; she was so glad that dear little Petite wasn't a bastard any more), I questioned
Bruno about his childhood, which had been spectacularly awful—or so it seemed
to me. For the majority of Dingoes, life is one long battle: against the
world, against their families, against their teachers, and against the decay of
their own minds and bodies. No wonder Bruno was the aggressive lout that he
was. But knowing this didn't make me like him any better.
When
the dinner was done and I thought we might make our escape, Bruno brought out
an envelope from his coat-pocket and announced, as though he really expected us
to be pleased, that he had five tickets for the fight.
"What fight?" I
asked.
"The boxing match at the armory. Kelly Broughan's there tonight, so it should
be worth seeing. I bet you don't see many good fights out there in the
asteroids, do you?"
"No," I said in defeated
tones. "None at all."
"There
are some beautiful gymnastic competitions though," Julie put in. "And
fencing, though no one is ever hurt."
Bruno's laugh was the bellow of a wounded
bull. Gymnastics was a good joke; beautiful was even better. "You're a card, Julie.
Dennis, that girl's a card."
Rocky's
eyes gleamed wickedly, intent upon prey. "Dennis, you really must come,
seeing that you're such a little scrapper yourself. And you
too, Mr. White. You look worn out. A man in your position needs
diversions now and then."
"What
the hell," Daddy said, "let's all gol And
afterwards we'll watch the fireworks."
"Oh, I love fireworks," Julie said
with forced cheer.
We
got up from the table with one accord. Bruno and Rocky were as happy as two
children. Julie and I were glum. But Daddy. . . .
Daddy
was in so profound an abyss of depression and defeat that he was quite
literally unaware of most of what was going on around him. He knew, as we did
not, that the Masters had presented their ultimatum to the Dingoes that day. It
had been decided that mankind could not be entrusted with its own affairs. All
men were henceforth to be put in kennels; there would be no more distinction
between Dingoes and pets. The High Cathode had been thrown into a panic by this
threat, and it had been determined, despite Daddy's pleading to the contrary,
that the Dingoes would shoot their wad that evening.
The Dingoes' wad—as Daddy knew, and as they
apparently did not—wasn't worth a plugged nickel. All they had was atom bombs.
Whether
it was because Bruno knew the gate-attendant or because Daddy was with us, I
don't know, but our general-admission tickets got us seats at ringside. The audience
in the smoky indoors stadium made the crowd at the parade sound like a bevy of
tranquihzed sheep. One woman near us (and I am convinced that it was the same who had kissed me in
Duluth and cursed me at the gallows)
was
screaming: "Murder
him! Murder the m--------------------- /" And
the
fight hadn't even begun!
A bell rang. Two men, modesdy nude except for
colored briefs, approached each other, moving their arms in nervous rhythms,
circling about warily. One (in red trunks) lashed out at the other with his
left hand, a feint to the stomach. With his right hand, he swung at the other
man's face. There was a cracking sound as his naked fist connected with his
opponent's cheekbone. The crowd began to scream.
Blood spurted from the man's nose. I averted
my eyes. Bruno, in his element, added his distinctive bellow to the uproar.
Rocky watched me closely, treasuring my every blanch
and wince. Daddy looked bored, and Julie kept her eyes shut through the whole
thing. I should have done the same, but when I heard another thunk of bone on flesh and a loud crash, curiosity overcame my finer feelings
and I looked back into the ring. The man in red trunks was lying on his back,
his expressionless face a scant few inches from my own. The blood flowed from
his nose and flooded the sockets of his eyes. Rocky was shrieking with pleasure,
but Bruno, who felt an alliegiance for the fighter in red trunks, shouted,
"Get up, you bum!"
I
rose from my seat, mumbling apologies, and found my way outside, where I was
discreetly sick in a hedge across the street from the Armory. Though I felt weak,
I knew that I did not have to faint. The Masters' conditioning was wearing off!
The hedge bordered on a park which had been
allowed to go to seed. Through the thick summer foliage I could see the glint
of moonlit water. I strolled down the hillside to the pond's edge.
Down
there, the din of the stadium melted into the other night sounds: the croaking
of the frogs, the rustle of poplar leaves, the
rippling water. It was quiet and Earthlike.
A
full moon shone overhead, like the echo of a thousand poems. All the Earthbound
poets who had stolen the fire of their lyrics from that moon, age after age! It
had passed them by, oblivious of histories, and it would pass me by in time.
That's the way that things should be, I thought. The leaves should fall in
autumn, snow in winter, grass springs up in spring, and the summer is brief.
I
knew then that I belonged to the Earth, and my spirit dilated with happiness.
It wasn't quite the right time to be happy—but there it was. Julie and the moon
were part of it, but it was also the frogs croaking, the poplars, the stadium;
Daddy, cynical, aspiring, even defeated; partly too, it was Bruno and Roxanna,
if only because they were so vital. These things melted into my memory of the
farmhouse, and it seemed that I could smell the winy smell of apples rotting
in the grass.
The sky was growing
brighter and brighter. The moon. . . .
But
was it the moon? A cloud of mist had gathered above the pond and it glowed
until the full moon was almost blotted out behind it.
The
Meshes of the Leash closed over my mind, and a voice inside my head purred
kindly: White
Fang, good boy! It's all right now. We
heard your call . . . (But
I hadn't called! It was just that I had been so happy!) . . . and now I've come. Your Master has come back at
last for you.
I cried out then, a simple cry of pain. To be
taken away now! Only a few days before I had cried for the
lack of this voice, and now— "NO!"
There,
it soothed, there, there, there. Has it been bad? Has it
been that very bad? Those terrible Dingoes have captured you, but it won't
happen again. There, there.
The
Leash began gently to stroke the sensory areas of the cortex: soft fur wrapped
me, scented with musk. Faint ripples of harp-music (or was that only the water
of the pond?) sounded behind my Master's voice, which poured forth comforting
words, like salve spread over a wound.
Then,
with a sudden pang, I remembered Daddy. (Don't think of your poor
father, the
Leash bade.)
He
was waiting for me. Julie was waiting for me. The Dingoes were waiting for me.
(We'll get Julie back too.
Now, don't you worry yourself any more about those nasty Dingoes. Soon there
won't be any Dingoes, ever, ever at all.
Desperately I tried not to think—or at least
to keep my thoughts so scrambled that I would not betray the things I knew. But
it was exactly this effort that focused my thoughts on the forbidden subjects.
I
tried to think of nonsense, of poetry, of the moon, dim behind the glowing air.
But the Leash, sensing my resistance, closed tighter around my mind, and cut
through my thin web of camouflage. It shuffled through my memory as though it
were a deck of cards, and it stopped (there was just time enough for me to
catch the images then) to examine images of my father with particular
attention.
There
was, on the very edge of my perception, a sound: Ourrp. Which was repeated: Ourrp. It was not a sound my Leash would make. The harp-music quavered for a
moment, becoming a prosaic ripple of water. I concentrated on that single
sound, straining against my Leash.
"What
is that sound?" I asked my Master. To answer me he had to stop sorting through
my memories. Nothing.
It's nothing. Don't think about it. Listen to the beautiful music, why don't
you? Think of your father.
Whatever
was making the sound seemed to be down in the grass. I could see clearly in the
wash of light from the nimbus above me. I parted the grass at my feet, and I
saw the beastly thing.
Don't think about itl
The
front half of a frog projected from the distended jaws of a water snake. The snake, seeing me, writhed, pulling his victim into the denser
grass.
Again
the Leash bade me not to look at this thing, and, truly, I did not want to. It
was so horrible, but I could not help myself.
The
frog had stretched his front legs to the side to prevent the last swallow that
would end him. Meanwhile, the back half of him was being digested. He emitted
another melancholy Ourrp.
Horrible,
I thought. Oh, horrible, horrible, horrible! Stop this.
You . . . must. . . stop. . ..
The
snake lashed his body, wriggling slowly backwards. The frog's front feet
grasped at sprigs of grass. His Ourrp had
grown quite weak. In the failing light, I almost lost sight of the struggle in
the shadow of the tall grass. I bent closer.
In
the moon's light I could see a thin line of white froth about the snake's
gaping jaws.
CHAPTER 12:
In which I am more or less responsible for saving the World.
The
cloud of light
disappeared. My Master had left, and I could hear Daddy calling my name. I ran
back up to the street. He was there with Julie.
"Mastery
I" Julie said. "You shouldn't have run off like that. We came out and
saw a light over the lake, and I was sure they'd carried you off."
"They
almost did. My Master was there, and I was in my Leash. But then I slipped out
of it—and he went away. Just disappeared. I don't
understand it. Are you all right, Daddy?"
I had asked because he was visibly shaking
with excitement. "Oh, quite, quite," he said, paying scant
attention. "I'm thinking though."
"He
had an idea," Julie explained. "Right after you ran out of the
stadium. I guess this is what happens when he has ideas."
Bruno
pulled up beside us in the limousine and honked, not because we hadn't seen
him, but just for the sake of honking. We got into the back seat and the car
tore off down the street at a speed that it could not have hit for the last
half century.
"Rocky's
making the calls you told her to, sir," Bruno announced.
"Fine. Now, Dennis, what was this about your
Master?"
I
explained what had happened, concluding with an account of the frog and the
snake. Not that I thought it relevant, but it had impressed me.
"And
while you were watching that, your Master just faded
away?"
"Yes. If he'd kept at
me much longer, he'd have learned everything he was looking for. I couldn't have
stood out against hirn. So why did he go?"
"One
more question: what did you feel about that frog? Precisely."
"It was ugly. I felt.
. . disgusted."
"Was
it anything like the way you felt at the fight tonight?"
"The
fight was worse in a way. The gnake was worse another way."
"But both induced similar feelings: a sense of ugliness, then disgust and nausea?" "Yes."
"Then
those are the weapons well fight them with. Dennis, my boy, before this night
is over, you will be a hero of the revolution."
"Don't
I deserve an explanation? Or does the revolution require ignorant heroes?"
"When
you left the fight earlier you looked so distressed that I was a bit amused.
Dennis is such an esthete still, I thought. And then I remembered the old saw: Like master, like man. Turn it around, and it's the formula for our
weapon. Like
man, like Master. The
Masters are nothing but their own pets, writ large. They're esthetes, every
last one of them. And we're
their favorite art-form. A
human brain is the clay they work in. They order our minds just the way they
order the Northern Lights. That's why they prefer an intelligent, educated pet
to an undeveloped Dingo. The Dingoes are lumpy clay, warped canvas, faulty
marble, verse that doesn't scan."
"They
must feel about Dingoes the way I do about Salvador Dali," Julie said.
She always wanted to argue about Dali with me, since she knows I like him
despite my better judgment.
"Or the way I feel about prize
fights," I suggested. "Or any experience," Daddy concluded,
"that offends the esthetic sensibilities. They can't stand
ugliness."
We
were silent for a while, considering this. Except Bruno.
"Give yourself time, Dennis. You'll get
so you enjoy the fights. Kelly just wasn't in form tonight, that's all."
Before
I could answer, the limousine was sailing down a concrete ramp into a
brightly-lit garage. "The hospital," Bruno announced.
A
man in a white robe approached us. "Everything is in readiness, Mr. White.
As soon as we received your call, we set to work."
"The radiomen are here
too?"
"They're
working with our own technicians already. And Mrs. Schwartzkopf said she'd join
her husband directly."
A
terrible light suddenly kindled the night sky outside the garage.
"The Masters!" I cried in terror.
"Damnation,
the bombs!" Daddy exclaimed. "I forgot all about them. Dennis, go
with the doctor and do what he says. I have to call up RIC headquarters and
tell them to stop the bombings."
"What are they trying
to hit?"
"They're trying to land one in the Van
Allen belt. I tried to tell them it wouldn't do any good. They tried that in 1972,
and it didn't accomplish a thing. But they were getting desperate, and I
couldn't suggest any better plan. But now it would knock out radio
communications, and we're going to be needing them.
Bruno, Julie—wait in the car for me."
A
team of doctors led me down the long enamel-white corridors to a room filled
with a complicated array of electronic and surgical equipment. The doctor-in-chief
indicated that I was to lie down on an uncomfortable metal pallet. When I had
done so, two steel bars were clamped on either side of my head. The doctor held
a rubber mask over my mouth and nose.
"Breathe deeply,"
he commanded.
The anesthetic worked quickly.
Daddy
was yelling at the doctor when I woke up. "Did you have to use an anesthetic? We don't have time to waste on daintinesses."
"The placement of the electrodes is a
very delicate operation. He should be awake in any moment." "He is
awake," I said.
The
doctor rushed over to my pallet. "Don't move your head," he warned.
Rather unnecessarily, it seemed, for my head was still clamped in the steel
vice, although I was now propped up into a sitting position.
"How are you
feeling?" Daddy asked.
"Miserable."
"That's
fine. Now, listen—the machine behind you . .
." ("Don't look," the doctor interrupted.) "... is an
electroencephalograph. It records brain waves."
The
doctor broke in again: "There are electrodes in six different areas. I've
tried to explain to your father that we're uncertain where perceptions of an
esthetic nature are centered. What is the relationship between pleasure and
beauty, for instance? Little work has been done since. . . ."
"Later,
doctor, later. Now what I want Dennis to do is suffer. Actually, it's White
Fang who must do the suffering. White Fang must drown in misery. I've already
arranged some suitable entertainments, but you should tell me right now if
there's anything especially distasteful to you that we might send off for. Some little phobia all your own."
"Please—explain what
this is all about."
"Your electroencephalograms are being
taken to every radio station in the city. The wave patterns will be amplified
and broadcast over AM and FM, radio and TV. Every station in the country—in the
world—is standing by to pick them up. Tomorrow night we'll give the Masters a
concert like they've never heard before."
A
man in workclothes brought in a blackboard and handed it to Daddy.
"Doctor, you have better fingernails
than I do. Rub them over this slate." It made an intolerable noise, which
the doctor kept up for a solid minute.
"How does the graph look?" Daddy
asked.
"Largest responses in the sensory areas. But fairly generalized
elsewhere, especially during the first twenty seconds."
"Well,
there's lots more coming. Look at these pictures, Dennis. Examine the
details." He showed me illustrations from an encyclopedia of pathology
that I will refrain from describing here. The people in the pictures were
beyond the reach of medicine. Beyond the reach, even, of sympathy. They were
ordered in an ascending degree of horribleness, concluding with a large
colorplate of . . . "Take these away!"
"The
response is stronger now and well sustained. Good definition."
Daddy
passed a vial of formaldehyde beneath my nose. It smelt awfully. Actually, it
was more of a bottle than a vial. In it—
I screamed.
"Excellent,"
the doctor said. "Really alarming curves for that."
"Bring in the
band," said Daddy.
A
crew of four men with musical instruments I was unfamiliar with (they were,
I've since learned, electric guitar, musical saw, accordion, and tuba) entered
the room. They were dressed in outlandish costumes: glorified working-clothes
in garish colors garnished with all sorts of leather and metal accessories. On
their heads were ridiculous, flaring bonnets.
"Extraordinary!"
the doctor said. "He's already responding."
They
began—well, they began to sing. It
was like singing. Their untuned instruments blasted out a stupid
One-two-three, One-two-three, repeating melody, which they accompanied with
strident screams of "Roll out the bare-ul."
When I thought that this new attack on my
sensibilities had reached the threshhold of tolerance, Daddy, who had been
watching me intently, leaped up and began to slam his feet on the floor and
join them in that awful song.
Daddy has a terrible voice
when he sings. It rasps.
But his voice was the least awfulness; it was
his behavior that was so mortifying. I wanted to turn my head away, but the
vice held it fast. For a man of such natural dignity to so debase himself, and
that man my own father!
This was, of course, just the response Daddy
was looking for.
When they had finished their gross display, I
begged for a moment's reprieve. Daddy dismissed the band and returned the
accordion player his cowboy hat.
"Don't
work him too hard, until we have some idea of his breaking point," the
doctor advised. "Besides, I'd like to see the intern, if you'll excuse me.
Those photographs gave me an idea: there are some patients in the hospital. . .
."
"Have you thought of anything, Dennis?"
"In
a way, yes. Is
Bruno still around?"
"He should be downstairs."
"If
he were to tell me about the things he enjoys—the very worst tilings—in the
long run he might think of more horrors than you. They seem to come naturally
to him."
"Good idea. I'll send
for him."
"Rocky too, if she's down there. I remember how she watched me at the boxing
match. She'd be able to help you quite a lot."
As Daddy went out of the room, the doctor
returned, escorting a caravan of wheelchairs and litters. Photographs are no
equivalent for the real thing.
It
went on that way for four hours, and every minute seemed worse than the one
before. Bruno had a limitless imagination, especially when it was abetted by
alcohol and his wife. He told me about his favorite fights to begin with. He
told me what he liked to do with pets—and what he would like to do if he had the time. Then he discoursed on the mysteries of
love, a subject on which Rocky too was eloquent.
After
two hours of these and other pleasures, I asked to have some coffee. Rocky left
for it and returned with a steaming mug from which I took one greedy swallow before
I realized it was not coffee. Rocky had remembered my peculiar attitude toward
blood.
When
I had been revived with smelling salts, Daddy brought in more entertainers.
They had come to the hospital directly after their last fight at the Armory.
For some reason, most of what happened after that point I can no longer remember.
We were out on the tile terrace of the
hospital, Daddy, Julie, and I. Below us the Mississippi was a pool of utter blackness
and unknown extent. It was an hour after sunset, and the moon had not yet risen. The only light came from the North, where the great
auroral floodlights swept out from the horizon across the constellations of the
north.
"Five minutes,"
Daddy announced nervously.
In
five minutes, radio stations all over the world would begin to broadcast my
performance of the night before. I had heard an aural equivalent of my
electroencephalograms, and I wasn't worried. In a war based on esthetics, that
recording was a Doomsday machine.
"Does
your head still hurt?" Julie asked, brushing a feather-light hand over my
bandages.
"Only
when I try to remember last night."
"Let me kiss the hurt
away."
"Three
minutes," Daddy announced, "and stop that.
You're making me nervous."
Julie straightened her blouse, which was made
of some wonderful, sheer, crinkly nylon. I had really begun to admire some of
the uses of clothing.
We
watched the aurora. All over the city, lights had been turned off. Everyone,
the whole world, was watching the aurora.
"What will you do now that you're High
Cathode?" Julie asked, to make the time pass.
"In a few minutes the revolution should
be over," Daddy replied. "I don't think I'd like administrative work.
Not after this."
"You're going to
resign?"
"As soon as they let me. I've got the itch to paint some more. Did
you know that I paint? I did that self-portrait that's over my desk. I think
it's pretty good, but I should be able to do better. In any case, it's
traditional for retired generals to paint. And then I might do my memoirs. I've
picked a title for them: The Esthetic Revolution."
"Or Viva Dingo!" Julie suggested.
"Ten seconds," I announced.
We
watched the northern skyline. The aurora was a curtain of bluish light across
which bands and streamers of intense whiteness danced and played.
At
first you couldn't notice any difference. The spectacle glimmered with the same
rare beauty that has belonged to it from time immemorial, but tonight its
beauty was that of a somber Dies Irae, played
just for us.
Then
one of the white bands that was shooting up from the
horizon disappeared, like an electric light being switched off. It seemed
unnaturally abrupt, but I couldn't be sure.
For
a long while nothing more happened. But when five of the arcing lights snapped
out of the sky at the same moment, I knew that the Masters were beginning their
exodus.
"Elephantiasis, I'll bet."
"What's that, Dennisr
"The
last picture in the bunch you showed me. I remember it very clearly."
The
auroral display was less bright by half when they came to the hillbilly band. I
turned on the radio just to be sure. Through all the blasts and shrieks and
whistles of my neural patterns, there was an unmistakable rhythm of Ooom-pah-pah, Ooom-pah-pah.
When
the broadcast came to Rocky's unspeakable potion, there was a tremendous blast
across the heavens. For an instant the entire sky was stained white. The white
faded. The aurora was only a dim blue-white shadow in the north. There was
hardly a trace of beauty in it. It flickered mean-inglessly
in random patterns.
The
Masters had left Earth. They couldn't stand the barking.
If you want to keep up with the best science-fiction stories of the year, you will want to get your copy ofs
WORLD'S
BEST SCIENCE FICTION 1966
Selected
and Edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr
Fifteen outstanding stories selected from the science-fiction and fantasy magazines of the world, including
great tales by Arthur C. Clarke, Fritz Leiber, Clifford D. Simak, James H. Schmitz, and others.
"Entertaining and Imaginative"
—Publishers Weekly
Ace Book H-15 600
Ace Books, Inc. (Dept. MM), 1120
Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10036.