Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Kelly exited the office, and closed the door. Just beyond the small brick building, a walkway extended at right angles from the track and came upon a dusty road. The town was to his left, perhaps ten minutes’ walk distant. Kelly followed the roadway, toward the town.

  He could see a door and two small windows at the back of the stationmaster’s house. Through one of the windows, Kelly saw something that made him pause and approach the house.

  He was looking into the kitchen. A table with a red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth stood close to the window. At the table sat a young woman, dressed only in a large pale-blue sheet she had wrapped around herself, one breast hanging nearly free. She was cutting her long hair with small blunt-ended scissors, without perceptible plan or pattern, just broad ragged swathes. The cut hair fell into a plate. Every few seconds the young woman reached for the plate with her free hand, picked up a thick lock of hair and crammed it into her mouth. She chewed mechanically, the strands of hair that protruded from her mouth grew shorter and shorter until they vanished, and then she swallowed.

  Kelly stared numbly for a while, then suddenly the door to the kitchen opened and the stationmaster came in. His voice came muffled through the window; he yelled at the young woman and pulled her out of the kitchen, she still clutching the scissors in one hand. Kelly had not been seen; he decided to return to the road and set out toward the town.

  The sun would be going down in about an hour and a half; though already, because of the overcast sky, the day seemed faded, on the verge of ending. Kelly felt the unease, like the pre-echo of depression, steal over him. There was at the back of his mind the awareness that he was being tested; that the Bureau would base its evaluation of his future, in large part, on what happened here, during his first real mission. He did not like the assignment at all, but when it had been offered him, he had known better than to refuse it.

  He was about to reach the outskirts of the town when he met the dog.

  He could not tell what breed it was. He did not like and did not understand animals, and knew very little about them. He forced himself to note the features of the dog. It had a long muzzle, but a fairly stout body. It was neither large nor small; it was a dirty brown in colour, with black pointed ears. Its forehead bulged out noticeably.

  “Stranger,” said the dog.

  Kelly had been forewarned; the report he had been given to read had dwelled on this. Yet he had not truly believed the story, and now that he saw it had all been true, it came to him as a bad shock. He found that he had stopped dead in his tracks. Sweat ran down his forehead in rivulets, stinging his eyes.

  The dog took two paces forward, sniffing. It did not look hostile, but to Kelly’s eyes it definitely did not look friendly. Dogs could smell emotions, especially fear; this he knew. He forced himself to speak.

  “My name is Kelly.” Then, absurdly, but he felt he must add something and didn’t know what to say, he added “How do you do?”

  The dog looked up, blinked. “Kelly,” it said. Its pronunciation was good, but not human. Its jaw and lips and tongue moved in complicated ways that did not seem to accord with the sounds they produced. “I-am-very-well-thank-you. My name is Leaper.”

  The dog’s bulging forehead was large enough to house a brain capable of higher cognitive functions. Experiments of this kind had been performed in the labs of Centrality, several times. Kelly had viewed films of Mister Chee, an augmented chimpanzee. In one, he had been signing with his trainers, arguing about a movie they had just seen. Kelly recalled that the chimp had won the argument. The difference here was twofold: this was a dog, not an ape, and it was actually speaking.

  “You belong to Doctor Jonas, yes?” said Kelly.

  “Yes. I’m Leaper. You’re Kelly. Why are you here?”

  “I’ve come to see the doctor.”

  “He won’t see you. He doesn’t cure people anymore.”

  “No, I’m here to talk about his work.”

  “He won’t see you.”

  “I’ll call on him in the morning, anyway.”

  The dog snuffled; a canine shrug? Kelly found he could not resist asking it the question that was foremost in his mind.

  “Tell me, how is it that you can talk? Doctor Jonas gave you a big brain, but a dog’s mouth isn’t made for talking.”

  “Sugary,” said the dog.

  “Pardon?”

  “Sugary.”

  Kelly thought there was annoyance in the tone. Suddenly understanding dawned on him. Without pause for reflection, he said, in what he realized a second too late was a condescending tone, “You mean surgery.”

  Leaper sneered, showing off its teeth, and emitted an unpleasant growl. Kelly grew alarmed, but the dog turned away, stalked off through the grasses at the side of the road, and vanished from sight.

  A fine beginning, Kelly thought to himself. You’ve already insulted one of the natives. It came to him an instant later what it was he had thought, but he could not erase the idea from his mind. With something of a shiver he went on his way and entered the town.

  It was quite a small place; three streets running roughly east-to-west, and two perpendicular intersecting avenues. Doctor Jonas’ laboratories were situated a short distance from the town itself, in a shallow valley screened by a stand of trees. Despite having perused a map of the environs Kelly found he was having some trouble orienting himself.

  Not far distant he saw the town’s single inn, a tall building behind which stretched fields running up to a low hill. He strode over to it, pushed the door and entered. A bell rang as the door swung open and once more as it closed. The lobby was carpeted in dark red, the walls were heavily varnished wood. The aroma of toast drifted in from what must be a kitchen beyond an open doorway screened with a flimsy plaid sheet. A fat woman officiated behind a counter.

  “Good evening, Madam; my name is Kelly. You have a reservation for me.”

  The woman sighed, opened a black ledger and, after much leafing through pages, found his reservation. She took a day’s payment in advance, gave him a key attached to an enormous metal prop, like a small dumbbell sawn in half.

  His room looked out over the back of the inn, the fields and the hill. The bathroom was appallingly small and the toilet made a constant hissing sound. Kelly laid his suitcase on the bed, tapped out the code on the lock-pads, and lifted the lid.

  He took out his shaving kit and a bottle of shampoo, and put them on the narrow edges of the sink. Left inside the suitcase were a pair of binoculars, several books, his gun, and wireless equipment. It was the latter that accounted for most of the suitcase’s weight. Kelly took out Principles of Animal Eugenetics, re-closed the suitcase, then put it underneath his bed. There were two brass false locks on the case, to discourage casual snoopers. More persistent ones would find that keys could not open the suitcase. The lock-pads were inconspicuous, and the coded sequence was twelve digits long. If a determined person tried to pry the suitcase open, he or she would set off the explosive charges embedded along the contours of the lid. The Bureau had strong feelings about private property, for all that this smacked of heterodoxy.

  Kelly opened the book at the page he had marked with a torn-off magazine subscription coupon. For twenty minutes he read, stretched out on the bed. The words hovered teasingly beyond his comprehension; he could understand the gist of the arguments, but not the details; and some of the leaps of logic he could not justify. In the end he put the book on the nightstand and rubbed his eyes. Theory might not be too much use. What he truly understood, anyway, was practice.

  He had seen the ultimate results of the chimpanzee experiments. Theory failed to account for them, but they could not be rationalized away. He remembered the final film on Mister Chee: the camera making its way into the chimp’s room, all the red on the walls, words written in blood, the script at first tiny and controlled, but
growing larger and wilder as the lines went on.

  You’re hurting me every day and every night. You’re forcing me to be bad I don’t want to be a bad person but you make me make me and you showed me God and he saw inside my mind and Yes YES IT HURTS THE LADI OUR GUIDE SEESE INTO MEE OH GOD I

  The last words were indecipherable, great looping letters fading into meaningless patterns, arabesques of blood splattered across the walls. The self-mutilated corpse was lying on the bed, clothes all torn away except for the neatly tied striped cravat. The right nether hand clutched a shining knife blade; both upper wrists were slashed open, tendons and bone exposed.

  Doctor Jonas had gone much further than the scientists of Centrality. There had been rumours for a long time about his activities; reports had been accumulating in the Bureau offices in Centrality. If the rumours were correct, the augmented dogs had been functioning for more than a year, without any anomalies. And giving them speech! Whatever eugenic method Jonas had discovered, it was invaluable.

  Eventually, letters had begun to be sent to Dr. Jonas, inviting him to visit the capital and make a presentation of his work. He had never given any response. Now it was Kelly’s task to get the information from him. Sending an enforcement squad would have been stupid: the doctor must not be scared off, and so a single agent had been sent to him. Bureau doctrine was clear and based upon long experience: scientists had to be coddled, otherwise they would not co-operate and became worse than useless. Knowledge was a dangerous thing, and the wielders of knowledge dangerous persons.

  Kelly felt hunger; he went down to the lobby, and asked if it was possible to get some food. The fat woman morosely sat him at a table in a small dining room decorated with old photographs, and served him a cold ham sandwich. Kelly was alone in the room.

  “Are there many other guests?” he asked the woman as she returned, bringing a bottle of beer.

  “Nah. Only you.”

  He could not get any more out of her. Munching the last of his sandwich, he examined the pictures. They seemed about twenty years old or so, were not labelled, and presented groups of people standing stiffly at attention, perhaps overwhelmed by the notion of posterity. Kelly’s eye was caught by one face that seemed familiar; it was, in fact, the stationmaster, in the photograph a younger man still in his middle-to-late thirties. Standing next to him was the same young woman he had seen at the house wrapped in a sheet and eating her own hair.

  Kelly swallowed and examined the photograph again. Of course, it could not be the same person. Yet he had kept a very clear mental picture of the young woman in the station house — he had earned high marks in Eidetics during his Bureau training — and he was positive the features were almost exactly the same. A daughter, probably. Still … uncanny.

  Kelly finished his beer and went back up to his room. The sun had set. Kelly looked out the window onto the fields, now grey under a cobalt-blue sky. From far away came a howl, then a chorus of howls. There were animals on the top of the hill. Kelly opened his suitcase, got out the binoculars. The animals looked like dogs; it was growing dim and they could not be seen clearly, though the top of the hill was bare of trees.

  The howls came again, but they were articulated this time, and Kelly after some time was able to make out the words. “Sugary,” they sang, “Sweet, sweet sugary.”

  In the morning Kelly went out of the inn, sauntered down into the valley, and presently arrived at the door of Doctor Jonas’ house. He rang the bell and waited for the door to open.

  Doctor Jonas looked like a banker. To be precise, he looked like the painting of a banker in a book Kelly had read when he was young, before the species had become extinct. Like that archetypal banker, Doctor Jonas was partially bald but kept a thick fringe of very dark hair; like the image, his ample jowls were closely shaven and his eyes were blue. He wore the kind of jacket the upper class had favoured in the pre-revolutionary days; in Centrality this would have been sufficient provocation to get him arrested. Here, in a town in the middle of nowhere, within the Doctor’s own house, it was no worse than a subtle insult, and probably not even that.

  “Good morning, Sir. I am sorry, but I no longer take patients. I advise you to see Dr. Duckett, who is a fully qualified—”

  “Actually, Doctor Jonas, I don’t come as a patient. I wondered if I might have some words with you.”

  The Doctor’s bland face showed almost no trace of emotion. “Are you from a newspaper?”

  “No, sir. My name is Kelly; I am an envoy from Centrality. I’ve just arrived, and I’m eager to speak with you.”

  “Well, in that case… Please step inside.”

  The Doctor led Kelly along a thickly carpeted corridor into a sitting room. The furnishings were massive, ostentatious; again this was the pre-revolutionary bourgeois style, but it was offset by a large portrait of Sebastian Bloom that dominated the room.

  “Please make yourself comfortable. Something to drink, Mister Kelly?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  There was a soft padding across the carpet and an augmented dog entered the room. This one was pale in colour, bigger but lankier than Leaper had been. It had the same bulging forehead.

  “Mister Kelly, this is one of my charges. Her name is Cotton. Say hello, Cotton.”

  “Hello, Mister,” said Cotton. Kelly nodded and mumbled a reply. Then the dog took a step closer to Kelly, sniffed loudly while pointing her nose toward his crotch and added, “You smell like you just had sex.”

  “Cotton! I’ve told you not to do that! Go away; bad dog!” Cotton hung her head and slunk away. Doctor Jonas’ face had ever-so-faintly coloured. “I apologize, Mister Kelly. That was Cotton’s idea of a joke — her sense of humour is not exactly like ours. She likes to make rude comments and embarrass people, and I haven’t quite been able to get it out of her.”

  “No matter.” Kelly made a gracious gesture. He did not at all feel like laughing. He set out his first bait. “Doctor Jonas, I hope I need not tell you how much Centrality holds you in esteem. These dogs you have eugenically altered are a splendid achievement. It was thought you might like to come and give a conference at the Academy of Sciences; if there is any time that is convenient to you…”

  “Thank you, but no. I am not ready at this time to present my findings fully.”

  “If you’ll allow me to ask, why not?” Kelly altered his intonation to put a subtle nuance of threat in the question.

  “Such things are complicated to explain,” said Doctor Jonas; his tone seemed to say that he was aware of the menace and considered it hollow. “I can tell you I will need many more months of work, perhaps as much as two or three years, before I am ready to give a conference.”

  “In that case, will you allow me to visit your laboratories?”

  Doctor Jonas made a sour face, but got up and led the way without speaking. Kelly followed him through the corridors of the house, down into the basement. He kept careful note of their journey, paying particular attention to windows.

  The Doctor pushed open a heavy door and ushered Kelly in. “This room holds initial subjects.” A strong animal reek dominated the room. There were about a dozen animals of various kinds held here; four rabbits in small wire cages, five dogs in larger enclosures of steel, three chickens and one parrot in birdcages hung from the ceiling.

  A girl was hunched in a corner, making tck-tck noises with her tongue. The Doctor called: “Lydia!” She rose from her crouch and turned to face the two men, smiling ingenuously. Kelly could see behind her a glass box full of white mice.

  “Hi, Daddy. I was looking at the mice.” She spoke and carried herself as a little girl of seven or eight would, but she was at least twenty years old. The impression of youth was amplified by her clothes: a thin blouse and skirt, shoes of shiny leather, and bare legs. Her right ankle was twisted out of shape and the flesh of the foot was cramped
by the shoe.

  “This is my daughter Lydia, Mister Kelly.” Lydia dropped a wobbling curtsy. “Don’t you have something to do, now, dear?”

  “Can I go and play in the yard with Jeremiah?”

  “Yes, dear.” Lydia skipped out of the room. Doctor Jonas immediately made a show of his apparatus, opening drawers full of scalpels, curettes and clamps, pointing to generalized anatomical charts pinned to the walls. There were thick ledgers full of breeding data, tables of reagents with scrawled notes in pencil. Kelly dutifully watched and noted. He knew, with the feeling of an important puzzle piece falling into place, that he had probably witnessed the main reason why the doctor had worked on augmenting animal intelligence: to compensate for his daughter’s feeblemindedness.

  After a time he interrupted Doctor Jonas’ patter and said: “Doctor, this is certainly interesting, but in fact it is merely the basics. I have some familiarity with eugenetics, and I’m aware that there is more — much more — to it than breeding charts, mutagenic chemicals and supplemental vivisection. I would very much like to see a work in progress, if I may.”

  The Doctor’s face pursed itself again, and with his full banker’s assurance, he said, “No, I’m afraid you may not. I do not show my ‘works in progress’. I only show finished experiments. I regret that I cannot show you more than I have.”

  As he was being walked out to the door, Kelly assayed the second bait.

  “I have been authorized by Centrality to make you an offer, Doctor Jonas. They are willing to give you large laboratories, fully equipped with the latest in technology, whatever you may want to work with. And a very respectable salary, and very good lodgings — for yourself and anyone else you need with you. How does that sound?”

  Doctor Jonas showed him to the door. He spoke with overt contempt in his voice. “I regret that we do not understand one another, Mister Kelly. I have no wish to leave this town. My laboratories are amply sufficient to my purposes and I do not need the latest in technology. Good day.”

  Kelly bowed — a deliberate pre-revolutionary ritual, a pale attempt to keep face somehow — and left. He felt his face must be burning with shame. He had pressed too hard; Doctor Jonas had become utterly obdurate. Had he completely ruined his chances?