The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  Then nothing.

  A nightmare room made of nightmare sound: barking, yelping, whimpering, snapping. I jerked awake, sat up, and discovered myself on a floating platform above a mass of dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, old dogs, puppies, sick dogs, dogs that looked all too healthy, flashing their forty-two teeth at me—why did I remember that number? From where? The largest and strongest dogs couldn’t quite reach me with their snaps, but they were trying.

  “You are operative,” the blue metal sphere said, floating beside me. “Now we must begin. Here.”

  Its basket held eggs and bread.

  “Get them away!”

  Obediently it floated off.

  “Not the food! The dogs!”

  “What to do with these dogs?”

  “Put them in cages!” A large black animal—German shepherd or Boxer or something—had nearly closed its jaws on my ankle. The next bite might do it.

  “Cages,” the metal sphere said in its uninflected mechanical voice. “Yes.”

  “Son of a bitch!” The shepherd leaping high, had grazed my thigh; its spittle slimed my pants. “Raise the goddamn platform!”

  “Yes.”

  The platform floated so high, so that I had to duck my head to avoid hitting the ceiling. I peered over the edge and…no, that wasn’t possible. But it was happening. The floor was growing upright sticks, and the sticks were growing cross bars, and the crossbars were extending themselves into mesh tops…Within minutes, each dog was encased in a cage just large enough to hold its protesting body.

  “What to do now?” the metal sphere asked.

  I stared at it. I was, as far as I knew, the first human being to ever enter an alien Dome, I was trapped in a small room with feral caged dogs and a robot…what to do now?

  “Why…why am I here?” I hated myself for the brief stammer and vowed it would not happen again. Law of Survival #2: Show no fear.

  Would a metal sphere even recognize fear?

  It said, “These dogs do not behave correctly.”

  “Not behave correctly?”

  “No.”

  I looked down again at the slavering and snarling mass of dogs; how strong was that mesh on the cage tops? “What do you want them to do?”

  “Do you want to see the presentation?”

  “Not yet.” Law #3: Never volunteer for anything.

  “What to do now?”

  How the hell should I know? But the smell of the bread reached me and my stomach flopped. “Now to eat,” I said. “Give me the things in your basket.”

  It did, and I tore into the bread like a wolf into deer. The real wolves below me increased their howling. When I’d eaten an entire loaf, I looked back at the metal sphere. “Have those dogs eaten?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you give them?”

  “Garbage.”

  “Garbage? Why?”

  “In hell they eat garbage.”

  So even the robot thought this was Hell. Panic surged through me; I pushed it back. Surviving this would depend on staying steady. “Show me what you fed the dogs.”

  “Yes.” A section of wall melted and garbage cascaded into the room, flowing greasily between the cages. I recognized it: It was exactly like the garbage I picked through every day, trucked out from a city I could no longer imagine and from the Army base I could not approach without being shot. Bloody rags, tin cans from before the War, shit, plastic bags, dead flowers, dead animals, dead electronics, cardboard, eggshells, paper, hair, bone, scraps of decaying food, glass shards, potato peelings, foam rubber, roaches, sneakers with holes, sagging furniture, corn cobs. The smell hit my stomach, newly distended with bread.

  “You fed the dogs that?”

  “Yes. They eat it in hell.”

  Outside. Hell was outside, and of course that’s what the feral dogs ate, that’s all there was. But the metal sphere had produced fruit and lettuce and bread for me.

  “You must give them better food. They eat that in…in hell because they can’t get anything else.”

  “What to do now?”

  It finally dawned on me—slow, I was too slow for this, only the quick survive—that the metal sphere had limited initiative along with its limited vocabulary. But it had made cages, made bread, made fruit—hadn’t it? Or was this stuff grown in some imaginable secret garden inside the Dome? “You must give the dogs meat.”

  “Flesh?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  No change in that mechanical voice, but the “no” was definite and quick. Law of Survival #4: Notice everything. So—no flesh-eating allowed here. Also no time to ask why not; I had to keep issuing orders so that the robot didn’t start issuing them. “Give them bread mixed with…with soy protein.”

  “Yes.”

  “And take away the garbage.”

  “Yes.”

  The garbage began to dissolve. I saw nothing poured on it, nothing rise from the floor. But all that stinking mass fell into powder and vanished. Nothing replaced it.

  I said, “Are you getting bread mixed with soy powder?” Getting seemed the safest verb I could think of.

  “Yes.”

  The stuff came then, tumbling through the same melted hole in the wall, loaves of bread with, presumably, soy powder in them. The dogs, barking insanely, reached paws and snouts and tongues through the bars of their cages. They couldn’t get at the food.

  “Metal sphere—do you have a name?”

  No answer.

  “Okay. Blue, how strong are those cages? Can the dogs break them? Any of the dogs?”

  “No.”

  “Lower the platform to the floor.”

  My safe perch floated down. The aisles between the cages were irregular, some wide and some so narrow the dogs could reach through to touch each other, since each cage had “grown” wherever the dog was at the time. Gingerly I picked my way to a clearing and sat down. Tearing a loaf of bread into chunks, I pushed the pieces through the bars of the least dangerous-looking dogs, which made the bruisers howl even more. For them, I put chunks at a distance they could just reach with a paw through the front bars of their prisons.

  The puppy I had first brought to the Dome lay in a tiny cage. Dead.

  The second one was alive but just barely.

  The old man’s mangy poodle looked more mangy than ever, but otherwise alert. It tried to bite me when I fed it.

  “What to do now?”

  “They need water.”

  “Yes.”

  Water flowed through the wall. When it had reached an inch or so, it stopped. The dogs lapped whatever came into their cages. I stood with wet feet—a hole in my boot after all, I hadn’t known—and a stomach roiling from the stench of the dogs, which only worsened as they got wet. The dead puppy smelled especially horrible. I climbed back onto my platform.

  “What to do now?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “These dogs do not behave correctly.”

  “Not behave correctly?”

  “No.”

  “What do you want them to do?”

  “Do you want to see the presentation?”

  We had been here before. On second thought, a “presentation” sounded more like acquiring information (“Notice everything”) than like undertaking action (“Never volunteer”). So I sat cross-legged on the platform, which was easier on my uncushioned bones, breathed through my mouth instead of my nose, and said “Why the hell not?”

  Blue repeated, “Do you want to see the presentation?”

  “Yes.” A one-syllable answer.

  I didn’t know what to expect. Aliens, spaceships, war, strange places barely comprehensible to humans. What I got was scenes from the dump.

  A beam of light shot out from Blue and resolved into a three-dimensional holo, not too different from one I’d seen in a science museum on a school field trip once (no, push memory away), only this was far sharper and detailed. A ragged and unsmiling toddler, one of thousands, staggered towar
d a cesspool. A big dog with patchy coat dashed up, seized the kid’s dress, and pulled her back just before she fell into the waste.

  A medium-sized brown dog in a guide-dog harness led around someone tapping a white-headed cane.

  An Army dog, this one sleek and well-fed, sniffed at a pile of garbage, found something, pointed stiffly at attention.

  A group of teenagers tortured a puppy. It writhed in pain, but in a long lingering close-up, tried to lick the torturer’s hand.

  A thin, small dog dodged rocks, dashed inside a corrugated tin hut, and laid a piece of carrion beside an old lady lying on the ground.

  The holo went on and on like that, but the strange thing was that the people were barely seen. The toddler’s bare and filthy feet and chubby knees, the old lady’s withered cheek, a flash of a camouflage uniform above a brown boot, the hands of the torturers. Never a whole person, never a focus on people. Just on the dogs.

  The “presentation” ended.

  “These dogs do not behave correctly,” Blue said.

  “These dogs? In the presentation?”

  “These dogs here do not behave correctly.”

  “These dogs here.” I pointed to the wet, stinking dogs in their cages. Some, fed now, had quieted. Others still snarled and barked, trying their hellish best to get out and kill me.

  “These dogs here. Yes. What to do now?”

  “You want these dogs to behave like the dogs in the presentation.”

  “These dogs here must behave correctly. Yes.”

  “You want them to…do what? Rescue people? Sniff out ammunition dumps? Guide the blind and feed the hungry and love their torturers?”

  Blue said nothing. Again I had the impression I had exceeded its thought processes, or its vocabulary, or its something. A strange feeling gathered in my gut.

  “Blue, you yourself didn’t build this Dome, or the starship that it was before, did you? You’re just a…a computer.”

  Nothing.

  “Blue, who tells you what to do?”

  “What to do now? These dogs do not behave correctly.”

  “Who wants these dogs to behave correctly?” I said, and found I was holding my breath.

  “The masters.”

  The masters. I knew all about them. Masters were the people who started wars, ran the corporations that ruined the Earth, manufactured the bioweapons that killed billions, and now holed up in the cities to send their garbage out to us in the refugee camps. Masters were something else I didn’t think about, but not because grief would take me. Rage would.

  Law of Survival #5: Feel nothing that doesn’t aid survival.

  “Are the masters here? In this…inside here?”

  “No.”

  “Who is here inside?”

  “These dogs here are inside.”

  Clearly. “The masters want these dogs here to behave like the dogs in the presentation.”

  “Yes.”

  “The masters want these dogs here to provide them with loyalty and protection and service.”

  No response.

  “The masters aren’t interested in human beings, are they? That’s why they haven’t communicated at all with any government.”

  Nothing. But I didn’t need a response; the masters’ thinking was already clear to me. Humans were unimportant—maybe because we had, after all, destroyed each other and our own world. We weren’t worth contact. But dogs: companion animals capable of selfless service and great unconditional love, even in the face of abuse. For all I knew, dogs were unique in the universe. For all I knew.

  Blue said, “What to do now?”

  I stared at the mangy, reeking, howling mass of animals. Some feral, some tamed once, some sick, at least one dead. I chose my words to be as simple as possible, relying on phrases Blue knew. “The masters want these dogs here to behave correctly.”

  “Yes.”

  “The masters want me to make these dogs behave correctly.”

  “Yes.”

  “The masters will make me food, and keep me inside, to make these dogs behave correctly.”

  Long pause; my sentence had a lot of grammatical elements. But finally Blue said, “Yes.”

  “If these dogs do not behave correctly, the masters—what to do then?”

  Another long pause. “Find another human.”

  “And this human here?”

  “Kill it.”

  I gripped the edges of my floating platform hard. My hands still trembled. “Put me outside now.”

  “No.”

  “I must stay inside.”

  “These dogs do not behave correctly.”

  “I must make these dogs behave correctly.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the masters want these dogs to display…” I had stopped talking to Blue. I was talking to myself, to steady myself, but even that I couldn’t manage. The words caromed around in my mind—loyalty, service, protection—but none came out of my mouth. I couldn’t do this. I was going to die. The aliens had come from God-knew-where to treat the dying Earth like a giant pet store, intrigued only by a canine domestication that had happened ten thousand years ago and by nothing else on the planet, nothing else humanity had or might accomplish. Only dogs. The masters want these dogs to display—

  Blue surprised me with a new word. “Love,” it said.

  Law #4: Notice everything. I needed to learn all I could, starting with Blue. He’d made garbage appear, and food and water and cages. What else could he do?

  “Blue, make the water go away.” And it did, just sank into the floor, which dried instantly. I was fucking Moses, commanding the Red Sea. I climbed off the platform, inched among the dog cages, and studied them individually.

  “You called the refugee camp and the dump ‘hell.’ Where did you get that word?”

  Nothing.

  “Who said ‘hell’?”

  “Humans.”

  Blue had cameras outside the Dome. Of course he did; he’d seen me find that first puppy in the garbage. Maybe Blue had been waiting for someone like me, alone and non-threatening, to come close with a dog. But it had watched before that, and it had learned the word “hell,” and maybe it had recorded the incidents in the “presentation.” I filed this information for future use.

  “This dog is dead.” The first puppy, decaying into stinking pulp. “It is killed. Non-operative.”

  “What to do now?”

  “Make the dead dog go away.”

  A long pause: thinking it over? Accessing data banks? Communicating with aliens? And what kind of moron couldn’t figure out by itself that a dead dog was never going to behave correctly? So much for artificial intelligence.

  “Yes,” Blue finally said, and the little corpse dissolved as if it had never been.

  I found one more dead dog and one close to death. Blue disappeared the first, said no to the second. Apparently we had to just let it suffer until it died. I wondered how much the idea of “death” even meant to a robot. There were twenty-three live dogs, of which I had delivered only three to the Dome.

  “Blue—did another human, before you brought me here, try to train the dogs?”

  “These dogs do not behave correctly.”

  “Yes. But did a human not me be inside? To make these dogs behave correctly?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to him or her?”

  No response.

  “What to do now with the other human?”

  “Kill it.”

  I put a hand against the wall and leaned on it. The wall felt smooth and slick, with a faint and unpleasant tingle. I removed my hand.

  All computers could count. “How many humans did you kill?”

  “Two.”

  Three’s the charm. But there were no charms. No spells, no magic wards, no cavalry coming over the hill to ride to the rescue; I’d known that ever since the War. There was just survival. And, now, dogs.

  I chose the mangy little poodle. It hadn’t bit me when the old man had s
urrendered it, or when I’d kept it overnight. That was at least a start. “Blue, make this dog’s cage go away. But only this one cage!”

  The cage dissolved. The poodle stared at me distrustfully. Was I supposed to stare back, or would that get us into some kind of canine pissing contest? The thing was small but it had teeth.

  I had a sudden idea. “Blue, show me how this dog does not behave correctly.” If I could see what it wasn’t doing, that would at least be a start.

  Blue floated to within a foot of the dog’s face. The dog growled and backed away. Blue floated away and the dog quieted but it still stood in what would be a menacing stance if it weighed more than nine or ten pounds: ears raised, legs braced, neck hair bristling. Blue said, “Come.” The dog did nothing. Blue repeated the entire sequence and so did Mangy.

  I said, “You want the dog to follow you. Like the dogs in the presentation.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want the dog to come when you say ‘Come.’”

  “Love,” Blue said.

  “What is ‘love,’ Blue?”

  No response.

  The robot didn’t know. Its masters must have had some concept of “love,” but fuck-all knew what it was. And I wasn’t sure I knew any more, either. That left Mangy, who would never “love” Blue or follow him or lick his hand because dogs operated on smell—even I knew that about them—and Blue, a machine, didn’t smell like either a person or another dog. Couldn’t the aliens who sent him here figure that out? Were they watching this whole farce, or had they just dropped a half-sentient computer under an upturned bowl on Earth and told it, “Bring us some loving dogs”? Who knew how aliens thought?

  I didn’t even know how dogs thought. There were much better people for this job—professional trainers, or that guy on TV who made tigers jump through burning hoops. But they weren’t here, and I was. I squatted on my haunches a respectful distance from Mangy and said, “Come.”

  It growled at me.

  “Blue, raise the platform this high.” I held my hand at shoulder height. The platform rose.

  “Now make some cookies on the platform.”

  Nothing.

  “Make some…cheese on the platform.”

  Nothing. You don’t see much cheese in a dump.