LEANNE FRAHM
Leanne Frahm lives with her husband in Slade Point, on the northern Queensland coast. She has had published around thirty stories in Australian, American and French magazines and anthologies, and five of her short stories appeared in a collection entitled Borderline, from MirrorDanse Books in 1996. She had been nominated several times for the Ditmar Award for short fiction and won it twice, and also won the Aurealis Award for best science fiction short fiction in 1996, with ‘Borderline’, the title story of the above collection. ‘Skein Dogs’ is her first published story for several years.
About this story, Leanne says “It is really an attempt to immortalize the two best dogs I ever owned - who became my children when my human ones had flown the nest. Kimball did indeed die as Jayjay does, and Missie had (very expensive!) knee reconstructions before she went too. The story is a tribute to them, and I hope they’ve found it satisfactory.”
* * * *
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ne evening Jayjay laughed and for the first time blood-tinged mucous trickled from her nostril. Laughing isn’t easy even for Skein dogs with modified larynxes, but Jayjay could laugh - it might have had something to do with the Bull Terrier in her and its clownish inheritance. The sound came out as a chortling grunt, and this time the pressure must have started the tumour bleeding. I grabbed a tissue and wiped it quickly, before she could lick it. She looked at me, and at the red-stained tissue, and turned away to pad over to her hammock without a word.
Emma didn’t notice. She was already curled up on the blankets in her hammock for the night, watching the news on TV, and had mumbled some sort of political comment that Jayjay caught. I missed it, but Jayjay must have thought it funny. Emma didn’t often make jokes; descended from the Blue Heelers with all their sly pragmatism, she didn’t have much of a sense of humour. Jayjay and Emma were an odd couple to be sharing a room and a carer - Jayjay extroverted and impulsive, Emma quiet and calculating - but we all got on together.
That night, after laughing and bleeding, Jayjay flopped down on her hammock next to Emma’s and put her head on her paws, staring at the flickering light of the TV. Emma glanced at her, saw the reddish moisture on her pale muzzle that I’d failed to completely wipe away, and looked away.
I watched them silently from the eating area, where I was cleaning away the remains of our meal, and wondered if they understood the concept of irony. The very process that allowed Jayjay to laugh and Emma to joke would eventually kill them. I wiped a plate with sudden savage motions and looked out at the night falling with tropical swiftness. Mostly all I could see were the crowding buildings of the Institute complex, but in a patch of deepening night sky a flock of flying-foxes flapped soundlessly out to its feeding grounds. I stared after them for some minutes, and sighed for Jayjay and Emma.
It’s well-known that human-canine gene splicing for intelligence enhancement carries with it a tangled cancer gene that can’t be unravelled. Jayjay and Emma knew it and both of them, (officially Skein Canine JJ18(B) and Skein Canine MA24(B)), were by then already victims of it.
We managed to ignore it most of the time. Jayjay’s cancer was growing above her palate in the nasal passages and sinuses. It had already eaten into the cartilage, and would eventually erode the thin layer of bone between it and her brain. Emma had two major tumours wrapped around the knees of her back legs, so that she could neither quite straighten them nor quite bend them, and she hobbled briskly around the Institute with a peculiar dragging gait like an ominous arthritic shadow.
Finished, the last plate put away, I walked over to the sleeping area and sat on my cot, next to Jayjay’s hammock. Her thinning white pelt gleamed in the screen’s reflections, highlighting the hills and valleys of her already gaunt ribs and spine. She and Emma stared straight ahead, but I don’t think either of them saw a thing.
It was Mustafa Skein who first succeeded in giving human intelligence to dogs. It was a sort of landmark in the science of genetics, but it turned out to be much more than that. People suddenly found there was a new world to be explored in the canine brain, a world of differing sensory perceptions and psychic abilities that they had previously only speculated about. More and more species were Skeined as quickly as possible and an entire science developed. But the gift of intelligence is sometimes a two-edged sword…
I sighed again. The Institute is good to its Skein animals because it suits them, and new ones are expensive. In practical terms, Jayjay and Emma were useful as long as their pain was controlled. Jayjay lost her sense of smell in the early stages of her cancer, so worked mainly with the psychic researchers, and Emma was with the sensory department.
I was getting on then, (and more so now, I suppose), and retired from active duty, but the Institute continued to employ me as a carer. I enjoyed it then, and still do, but there were, and are, difficult times. Like this one…
I tried to think of something to say to break the dogs’ pensive mood. The news broadcast went on and on, sombre and sincere, like every other television news I had ever seen. “Would you like to watch something else?” I tried.
Jayjay shook her head without raising it from her paws.
“I would,” said Emma hopefully.
“No,” Jayjay grunted, and Emma glared at her. Jayjay was alpha dog in their two-wolf pack - maybe it was a three-wolf pack, because somehow I always seemed to give her her own way too. “I want to talk.”
“All right,” I said, pressing Off on the TV remote.
Emma made her feelings known by lurching from her hammock and staggering off to use the flush tray in the cleanup room. Jayjay got up too, and padded over to me. She laid her head on my knee. “There’s something I want to do.” She curled her upper lip into a smile, rounded her big brown eyes and laid her ears back. She knew I was always a sucker for that look. “I would really, really…” she began.
I scruffed her under the ear. “Really what?” I prompted.
“Really, really like to watch Making Millions,’” muttered Emma, sidling back into the room. “I know all the answers.”
Jayjay swung her head towards her and her curled lip tightened. I noticed a dark red clot oozing towards her mouth and wiped it quickly. “Go on,” I said.
She raised her muzzle to my face, her tail waving slowly from side to side. “I would really, really like to go outside.”
“Into the courtyard?” I said.
“No. Outside. Outside the Institute.”
Emma sat down awkwardly with her hind legs splayed straight out and cocked her head to one side, looking at Jayjay with astonishment. I was surprised too, and didn’t answer straight away.
Jayjay sensed my puzzlement. “Only for a little while,” she went on. “Just for a walk. Like in the courtyard, only - outside.”
“But we never have…” I started. Then, “I mean, why?”
Jayjay’s hoarse voice took on an edge I didn’t recognize. “Didn’t some human once say, ‘Because it’s there’? As sound a reason as any. Besides…”
“Besides what?” said Emma before I could.
“I’m dying,” Jayjay said in her blunt Bull Terrier way. “So humour me.” She turned and went back to jump onto her hammock and looked away from us, into the dark where the TV was just a blacker square of nothingness.
Emma looked at me, the look as direct and deep and desolate as time. I shrugged and nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” and it was my turn to mutter.
* * * *
I got both permission and directions from the Institute to visit a small fenced area of bushland at the very back of the Institute’s land, a space earmarked for further expansion. The permission came with an uncertain “I don’t see that it can do any harm” and the directions with a scribbled map on a scrap of paper. I have to admit that both surprised me, but I happy to take advantage of them, I thought for the dogs’ sake.
I’d driven the little buggies that the staff used to negotiate the paths around the Institute before, but Jayjay and Emma had never been in one, and I wondered if they might be nervous at first.
I was wrong.
“Faster, faster!” yipped Emma, balancing with her front feet on the side of the buggy and her weight thrust forward. Her tongue lolled out, her black ears flapped like flags, and her bright liquid eyes were radiant with excitement. The few people we passed stared after us. Jayjay sat quietly beside me, her nose up, scenting vainly at the warm afternoon air. Her eyes squinted against the mild breeze our slow speed created and her ears were so close to her head they had practically disappeared. Every now and then she would move her head over and delicately lick me on my cheek, just one lick, then back to the wind.
The huge concrete buildings of the Institute gradually thinned out; eventually the path was bordered mostly with smaller aluminium-sided factories and block warehouses, with brownish grass and weedy looking plants fronting them. I saw an occasional stunted tree with gnarled branches and tired-looking leaves, and soon we were following a high metal fence. The path led to a gate in the fence and I climbed out of the buggy. Jayjay pushed her way past Emma to jump nimbly down from the seat and Emma crawled laboriously after her.
They waited prick-eared while I opened the gate, and we all went through.
Into a new world.
I stared around, and so did the dogs. We were in an open paddock tufted with clumps of tall bright green grasses that swayed with the gentle wind. Insects leapt and flew between the clumps, silently or with buzzing noises, or dragged colourful rounded bodies over the sand from which the grasses grew. The ground was dotted with the figures of several types of birds that moved and pecked at random with large hard beaks and fierce black eyes that I didn’t trust. We stood still, and quiet. I’d been in the Institute for so long, the rawness of this place and its vague unpredictability left me breathless and uncertain. Emma and Jayjay must have felt the same. Only our eyes moved, taking in all of its unknowns and unknowings.
At the furthest end was a place of huge trees and underbrush so thick I couldn’t see the metal fence beyond, though I was sure it was there. This small forest was even more imposing than the grassland we were standing in, more compelling. I looked up, into the deep blue of an unrestricted sky, where more sorts of birds were flying back and forth and round and round, and the sun was a white ball of brilliance that hurt my eyes.
“Well,” I said finally, blinking. “Here we are. Do you want to walk around a bit?”
Neither of the dogs answered. They began to move instead, and I started off with them.
We walked in ever-widening circles through the paddock, close together at first, as if for comfort and protection, but gradually our paths diverged. A small striped lizard darted from a stand of grass and Jayjay ran after it, trying to corner it with her front paws, her rump in the air, her tail waving a frantic semaphore. Her mouth gaped and her tongue protruded between her sharp incisors. The lizard kept getting away, or maybe there was a family of lizards, and Jayjay leapt from one place to another, distracted by the liveliness of it all.
Emma limped along more slowly, unable to leap or dart, but with her nose glued steadfastly to the ground, inhaling scents she had never known before. She made her way around the grasses and bushes, and even stubbornly through them. I could smell the heat of the grass and a hundred other scents that I didn’t know, and I wondered briefly and enviously how much more infinite were the messages that Emma sniffed out.
Suddenly Jayjay stopped and squatted, and I saw a trickle of urine dampen the sand under her. “Jayjay,” I said sharply, surprised. “What are you doing?” I’d never seen any of the Institute’s dogs use anything but the flush-trays.
Jayjay stood up and grinned. “I don’t know,” she panted, “but it feels good.” She scratched at the grass wildly with her hind legs and Emma came over to sniff the wet patch, then she hunched over and added more liquid to the spot. Jayjay laughed loudly. “See?” she said. “It’s fun. You do it too.”
I rolled my eyes in disapproval and we continued, both dogs stopping to urinate time and time again until I began to wonder if the outside had given them bladder infections.
Emma disappeared into a bigger clump of bushes with coloured flowers that cascaded to the ground as she rustled through them. Jayjay was intent on finding more lizards in the sandy patches. I watched them both, enjoying their pleasure. Emma emerged from the flowering bushes with a wreath of tiny purple blossoms on her head above her glaring excited eyes, and I laughed out loud at the sight. And without exactly meaning to, I found I was moving closer and closer to the stand of trees.
All at once I was in shade, and I stopped and looked up. I had passed through the thickest of the underbrush and now an umbrella of twisting branches and thick leaves reared overhead, shielding me from the glare of the sun. I was only twenty metres from the nearest tree. The ground was barer here, the trees drinking up the goodness out of the ground.
I shivered despite the heat, hardly noticing that Jayjay and Emma had finally joined me, panting from their exertions. We stared into the woods together. Thick trucks erupted from the earth like marble columns, but these columns were clothed in tatters of thin papery bark and grew out into winding boughs that wove intricate patterns of twigs and leaves above us. Birds smaller than those in the sky flew from branch to branch, diving and calling. A breeze blew a shower of dying leaves down around us, and the vegetable smell was strong and stirring.
We stood motionless for a long time, savouring the being of the place, until a movement far off near the base of one of the trees caught our attention. It was another lizard, but this one was huge, enormous, a titan of a lizard with yellow and cream stripes along its flanks, nearly as long as I am high. It moved with a slow high arching of its legs, and even at that distance I could see its feet ended in long curved claws. I felt the dogs tense, and put out a warning hand, glancing at them. Jayjay was all muscular alertness, ears pricked forward, but Emma was quivering, coiling tightly down into herself. Her head was jutted out and down and a fierce dark light shone in her eyes that I had never seen before. She made a harsh rattling noise from deep in her throat. “Emma,” I cautioned, but I was too late. She sprang forward.
And ran. Emma ran.
Her wounded hind legs pumped up and down like freshly oiled pistons. Her body was low to the ground, serpentine, coat blacker than black in the shade. And unbelievably, she ran.
Jayjay, startled, leapt after her like a flash of white lightning, and I thumped clumsily over the ground as fast as I could after her. The dragon of a lizard heard us and reared its head, swinging it around in our direction. I saw a thin forked tongue flash from its lipless mouth and I felt a moment of terrified certainty that it would rear up and rip the oncoming Emma to pieces in no time at all.
Instead, it moved with surprising speed and agility to the tree and climbed it so rapidly that by the time Emma arrived, joined quickly by Jayjay and finally by me, the only sign of the lizard was a tail disappearing amidst the high foliage of the canopy.
I put out a hand to a nearby tree to steady myself and slumped over, gasping for breath. Jayjay and Emma stood panting heavily with their heads down, tongues trailing, their sides bellowing. None of us could say a word for several minutes.
“Don’t ever,” I managed at last, “do that again.”
Jayjay eyed me between puffs and grinned, while Emma furtively licked froth from her lips and looked away. The shade cooled the heat of our running and we stood gazing around, now that we were in the small forest proper. I noticed the silence. The sounds of our rush through the trees had startled the birds and they were quiet. The peace of the place seeped into us. I felt the papery coolness of the tree bark under my palm and dug my fingers through it into the muscular heart of the trunk. It felt good. I looked up at the low thick branches. It would be so easy to climb this tree…
“Go on, do it.” Jayjay’s grin was wider and Emma raised her head to look into my face. I did it, that look said. You can too.
I stood back for a minute, considering. The giant lizard may have moved far away through the canopy, or it might be in hiding up there, waiting for me… Jayjay licked my hand encouragingly. I clenched my jaw, reached up and carefully clambered to the security of the lower branches. I stood in a fork and looked down at the dogs. Emma had slumped to the ground, but they both gazed up at me expectantly. “Go on!” Jayjay called. I looked up, at the maze of branches above, and suddenly felt a burst of exhilaration. I leapt for a higher branch, and then another, and another. I laughed out loud.
Jayjay started circling the tree, both dogs started barking. Emma’s bark was hoarse and low, Jayjay’s higher pitched and sharp. I called back at them, still laughing, and they barked louder. Jayjay leapt up the tree as if she would join me, ripping at the bark and shredding it into strips with her sharp teeth.
I climbed up and up. I felt the breeze stronger now, higher, felt it lift my hair, feather it out around me. Emma’s bark was a pulsing basso beat inside my head, and my fingers curled strongly on the rungs of my tree as I swung higher and higher. I forgot my fear of the giant lizard - let it come, I was strong, I was the tree conqueror! I shouted at the sky above and down at the leaping hysterically barking Jayjay with delight. Emma pulled herself forward with her front paws belly-down and howled. I climbed and roared. We drowned all the sounds of the earth with our noise as I came to the top of the tree and gazed out across my world.
The dogs stopped barking. I stopped shouting. Only the wind moaned as I swung lightly in the topmost branches, my breath catching in my throat. Rocking there, I felt a silent moment of timeless wonder - until I turned, and saw the tall buildings of the Institute raised up higher than the trees. I suddenly remembered what I was and where I was.
A Skein dog carer at the top of a high tree.
I suddenly felt foolish, with the bark rasping uncomfortably against my skin and insects humming in my face. I looked down.
Jayjay and Emma now lay quietly at the base of the tree, looking uneasily up at me, as if we had all shared the same thought at the same time. I was uncertain; climbing up seemed much easier than climbing down. Cautiously I started to feel my way down the tree. The branches swayed dangerously under my weight and twigs caught in my tangled hair and scraped my skin, but I managed, and with a final awkward jump, made it to the ground.
Jayjay got to her feet and licked me fervently. I smiled and said something inane, maybe “I think it’s time to go home.” I remember they both nodded, subdued. There was no talk, no conversation, between us, about what had happened.
Emma was completely lame. Jayjay and I had to help her to her feet and across the paddock to the gate and the waiting buggy. While we were doing that, I noticed an almost constant trickle of watery blood from Jayjay’s nose. I had nothing to wipe it with; she licked it impatiently from time to time.
* * * *
An official reprimand was waiting for me when I returned the buggy. This was after I’d taken the dogs to their room. We had made too much noise. It had carried on the wind to the rest of the Institute and disturbed the other Skein animals, disrupted them.
I apologized, without mentioning Jayjay hunting lizards or Emma running - or me, climbing the tree. We were sorry, we didn’t know what we were thinking of, of course it wouldn’t happen again… And it didn’t. Within a fortnight, Jayjay would die of a brain haemorrhage, and six months later Emma’s expanding tumours would cause her euthanasia. And I would move on to care for other Skein dogs.
But that evening, all that was in the future, and Jayjay and Emma and I were still wrapped in the mystery of the afternoon events. Or rather, Jayjay and I were. Emma had fallen asleep over her evening meal, and I’d carried her to her hammock where she lay snoring and twitching her feet in running dreams.
Jayjay sat with me while I cleaned the eating space. When I finished and sat down, she came over to me and put her head in my lap. I automatically wiped her nose.
“Thank you,” she said.
“What for?” I asked.
“For letting me be a dog again.”
I looked through the window at the nightly migration of the flying foxes, dark shapes across the map of stars. I ruffled the fur around her collar with its insignia, Skein Canine JJ18(B). “And thank you,” I said.
“What for?” she echoed, licking my wrist. My identity bracelet clinked under her rough warm tongue and I looked at it. Skein Orang Utan C12(F).
“For letting me be me again,” I said.
We petted each other far into the restless night.