Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  "You’re actually going to show us Butterballs being . . . processed?" asked Julie distastefully.

  "Certainly not," answered Cotter. "I’m just going to show you the plant. The process is painless and efficient, but I see no value in your being able to report that you watched our animals being prepared for market."

  "Good!" said Julie with obvious relief.

  Cotter gestured to an open bus that was parked a few hundred meters away, and it soon pulled up. After everybody was seated, he climbed on and stood next to the driver, facing us.

  "The plant is about five miles away, at almost the exact center of the farm, insulated from curious eyes and ears."

  "Ears?" Julie jumped on the word. "Do they scream?"

  Cotter smiled. "No, that was just an expression. We are quite humane, far more so than any meat packing plant that existed before us."

  The bus hit a couple of bumps that almost sent him flying, but he hung on like a trooper and continued bombarding us with information, about three-quarters of it too technical or too self-serving to be of any use.

  "Here we are," he announced as the bus came to a stop in front of the processing plant, which dwarfed the barn we had just left. "Everyone out, please."

  We got off the bus. I sniffed the air for the odor of fresh blood, not that I knew what it smelled like, but of course I couldn’t detect any. No blood, no rotting flesh, nothing but clean, fresh air. I was almost disappointed.

  There were a number of small pens nearby, each holding perhaps a dozen Butterballs.

  "You have perhaps noticed that we have no vehicles capable of moving the hundreds and thousands of units we have to process each day?" asked Cotter, though it came out more as a statement than a question.

  "I assume they are elsewhere," said the lady from India.

  "They were inefficient," replied Cotter. "We got rid of them."

  "Then how do you move the Butterballs?"

  Cotter smiled. "Why clutter all our roads with vehicles when they aren’t necessary?" he said, tapping out a design on his pocket computer. The main door to the processing plant slid open, and I noticed that the Butterballs were literally jumping up and down with excitement.

  Cotter walked over to the nearest pen. "Who wants to go to heaven?" he asked.

  "Go to heaven!" squeaked a Butterball.

  "Go to heaven!" rasped another.

  Soon all twelve were repeating it almost as if it were a chant, and I suddenly felt like I was trapped inside some strange surrealistic play.

  Finally, Cotter unlocked their pen and they hopped–I hadn’t seen any locomote at the other barn–up to the door and into the plant.

  "It’s as simple as that," said Cotter. "The money we save on vehicles, fuel, and maintenance allows us to–"

  "There’s nothing simple about it!" snapped Julie. "This is somewhere between blasphemy and obscenity! And while we’re at it," she added suspiciously, "how can a dumb animal possibly know what heaven is?"

  "I repeat, they are not sentient," said Cotter. "Just as you have code words for your pet dog or cat, we have them for the Butterballs. Ask your dog if he wants a treat, and he’ll bark or sit up or do whatever you have conditioned him to do. We have conditioned the Butterballs in precisely the same way. They don’t know the meaning of the word ‘heaven’ any more than your pet knows the meaning of the word ‘treat,’ but we’ve conditioned them to associate the word with good feelings and with entry into the processing plant. They will happily march miles through a driving rain to ‘go to heaven.’ "

  "But heaven is such a . . . a philosophical concept," persisted the Indian woman. "Even to use it seems–"

  "Your dog knows when he’s been good," interrupted Cotter, "because you tell him so, and he believes you implicitly. And he knows when he’s been bad, because you show him what he’s done to displease you and you call him a bad dog. But do you think he understands the abstract philosophical concepts of good and bad?"

  "All right," said Julie. "You’ve made your point. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not see the inside of the slaughterhouse."

  "The processing plant," he corrected her. "And of course you don’t have to enter it if it will make you uncomfortable."

  "I’ll stay out here, too," I said. "I’ve seen enough killing down in Paraguay and Uruguay."

  "We’re not killing anything," explained Cotter irritably. "I am simply showing you–"

  "I’ll stay here anyway," I cut him off.

  He shrugged. "As you wish."

  "If you have no vehicles to bring them to the plant," asked the Brit, approaching the entrance, "how do you move the . . . uh, the finished product out?"

  "Through a very efficient system of underground conveyers," said Cotter. "The meat is stored in subterranean freezers near the perimeter of the property until it is shipped. And now . . ." He opened a second pen, offered them heaven, and got pretty much the same response.

  Poor bastards, I thought as I watched them hop and waddle to the door of the plant. In times gone by, sheep would be enticed into the slaughterhouse by a trained ram that they blindly followed. But leave it to us to come up with an even better reward for happily walking up to the butcher block: heaven itself.

  The Butterballs followed the first dozen into the belly of the building, and the rest of the pool followed Cotter in much the same way. There was a parallel to be drawn there, but I wasn’t interested enough to draw it.

  I saw Julie walking toward one of the pens. She looked like she didn’t want any company, so I headed off for a pen in the opposite direction. When I got there, four or five of the Butterballs pressed up against the fence next to me.

  "Feed me!"

  "Feed me!"

  "Pet me!"

  "Feed me!"

  Since I didn’t have any food, I settled for petting the one who was more interested in being petted than being fed.

  "Feel good?" I asked idly.

  "Feel good!" it said.

  I almost did a double-take at that.

  "You’re a hell of a mimic, you know that?" I said.

  No reply.

  "Can you say what I say?" I asked.

  Silence.

  "Then how the hell did you learn to say it feels good, if you didn’t learn it just now from me?"

  "Pet me!"

  "Okay, okay," I said, scratching it behind a tiny ear.

  "Very good!"

  I pulled my hand back as if I’d had an electric shock. "I never said the word ‘very.’ Where did you learn it?" And more to the point, how did you learn to partner it with ‘good’?

  Silence.

  For the next ten minutes I tried to get it to say something different. I wasn’t sure what I was reaching for, but the best I got was a "Pet me!" and a pair of "Good’s."

  "All right," I said at last. "I give up. Go play with your friends, and don’t go to heaven too soon."

  "Go to heaven!" it said, hopping up and down. "Go to heaven!"

  "Don’t get so excited," I said. "It’s not what it’s cracked up to be."

  "See Mama!" it squealed.

  "What?"

  "See God! See Mama!"

  Suddenly, I knew why MacDonald was being treated for depression. I didn’t blame him at all.

  I hurried back to the slaughterhouse, and when Cotter emerged alone a moment later, I walked up to him.

  "We have to talk," I said, grabbing him by the arm.

  "Your colleagues are all inside inspecting the premises," he said, trying to pull himself loose from my grip. "Are you sure you wouldn’t care to join them?"

  "Shut up and listen to me!" I said. "I just had a talk with one of your Butterballs."

  "He told you to feed him?"

  "He told me that he would see God when he went to heaven."

  Cotter swallowed hard. "Oh, shit–another one!"

  "Another one of what?" I demanded. "Another sentient one?"

  "No, of course not," said Cotter. "But as often as we impress the need for absolu
te silence among our staff, they continue to speak to each other in front of the Butterballs, or even to the Butterballs themselves. Obviously this one heard someone saying that God lives in heaven. It has no concept of God, of course; it probably thinks God is something good to eat."

  "He thinks he’s going to see his mother, too," I said.

  "He’s a mimic!" said Cotter severely. "Surely you don’t think he can have any memory of his mother? For Christ’s sake, he was weaned at five weeks!"

  "I’m just telling you what he said," I replied. "Like it or not, you’ve got a hell of a P.R. problem: Just how many people do you want him saying it to?"

  "Point him out to me," said Cotter, looking panicky. "We’ll process him at once."

  "You think he’s the only one with a vocabulary?" I asked.

  "One of the very few, I’m sure," said Cotter.

  "Don’t be that sure," said Julie, who had joined us while I was talking to Cotter. She had an odd expression on her face, like someone who’s just undergone a religious experience and wishes she hadn’t. "Mine looked at me with those soft brown eyes and asked me, very gently and very shyly, not to eat it."

  I thought Cotter would shit in his expensive suit. "That’s impossible!"

  "The hell it is!" she shot back.

  "They are not sentient," he said stubbornly. "They are mimics. They do not think. They do not know what they are saying." He stared at her. "Are you sure he didn’t say ‘feed’? It sounds a lot like ‘eat.’ You’ve got to be mistaken."

  It made sense. I hoped he was right.

  " ‘Don’t feed me?’ " repeated Julie. "The only un-hungry Butterball on the farm?"

  "Some of them speak better than others. He could have been clearing his throat, or trying to say something that came out wrong. I’ve even come across one that stutters." It occurred to me that Cotter was trying as hard to convince himself as he was to convince her. "We’ve tested them a hundred different ways. They’re not sentient. They’re not!"

  "But–"

  "Consider the facts," said Cotter. "I’ve explained that the words sound alike. I’ve explained that the Butterballs are not all equally skilled at articulation. I’ve explained that after endless lab experiments the top animal behavioral scientists in the world have concluded that they are not sentient. All that is on one side. On the other is that you think you may have heard something that is so impossible that any other explanation makes more sense."

  "I don’t know," she hedged. "It sounded exactly like . . ."

  "I’m sure it did," said Cotter soothingly. "You were simply mistaken."

  "No one else has ever heard anything like that?" she asked.

  "No one. But if you’d like to point out which of them said it. . . ."

  She turned toward the pen. "They all look alike."

  I tagged along as the two of them walked over to the Butterballs. We spent about five minutes there, but none of them said anything but "Feed me!" and "Pet me!," and finally Julie sighed in resignation.

  "All right," she said wearily. "Maybe I was wrong."

  "What do you think, Mr. McNair?" asked Cotter.

  My first thought was: what the hell are you asking me for? Then I looked into his eyes, which were almost laying out the terms of our agreement, and I knew.

  "Now that I’ve had a few minutes to think about it, I guess we were mistaken," I said. "Your scientists know a lot more about it than we do."

  I turned to see Julie’s reaction.

  "Yeah," she said at last. "I suppose so." She looked at the Butterballs. "Besides, MacDonald may be a zillionaire and a recluse, but I don’t think he’s a monster, and only a monster could do something like . . . well . . . yes, I must have been mistaken."

  And that’s the story. We were not only the first pool of journalists to visit the farm. We were also the last.

  The others didn’t know what had happened, and of course Cotter wasn’t about to tell them. They reported what they saw, told the world that its prayers were answered, and only three of them even mentioned the Butterballs’ special talent.

  I thought about the Butterballs all during the long flight home. Every expert said they weren’t sentient, that they were just mimics. And I suppose my Butterball could very well have heard someone say that God lived in heaven, just as he could have heard someone use the word "very." It was a stretch, but I could buy it if I had to.

  But where did Julie Balch’s Butterball ever hear a man begging not to be eaten? I’ve been trying to come up with an answer to that since I left the farm. I haven’t got one yet–but I do have a syndicated column, courtesy of the conglomerate that owns the publishing company.

  So am I going to use it to tell the world?

  That’s my other problem: Tell it what? That three billion kids can go back to starving to death? Because whether Cotter was telling the truth or lying through his teeth, if it comes down to a choice between Butterballs and humans, I know which side I have to come down on.

  There are things I can control and things I can’t, things I know and things I am trying my damnedest not to know. I’m just one man, and I’m not responsible for saving the world.

  But I am responsible for me–and from the day I left the farm, I’ve been a vegetarian. It’s a small step, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

  THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW

  Michael Swanwick

  The dog looked as if he had just stepped out of a children’s book. There must have been a hundred physical adaptations required to allow him to walk upright. The pelvis, of course, had been entirely reshaped. The feet alone would have needed dozens of changes. He had knees, and knees were tricky.

  To say nothing of the neurological enhancements.

  But what Darger found himself most fascinated by was the creature’s costume. His suit fit him perfectly, with a slit in the back for the tail, and again a hundred invisible adaptations that caused it to hang on his body in a way that looked perfectly natural.

  "You must have an extraordinary tailor," Darger said.

  The dog shifted his cane from one paw to the other, so they could shake, and in the least affected manner imaginable replied, "That is a common observation, sir."

  "You’re from the States?" It was a safe assumption, given where they stood on the docks and that the schooner Yankee Dreamer had sailed up the Thames with the morning tide. Darger had seen its bubble sails over the rooftops, like so many rainbows. "Have you found lodgings yet?"

  "Indeed I am, and no I have not. If you could recommend a tavern of the cleaner sort?"

  "No need for that. I would be only too happy to put you up for a few days in my own rooms." And, lowering his voice, Darger said, "I have a business proposition to put to you."

  "Then lead on, sir, and I shall follow you with a right good will."

  The dog’s name was Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux, but "Call me Sir Plus," he said with a self-denigrating smile, and "Surplus" he was ever after.

  Surplus was, as Darger had at first glance suspected and by conversation confirmed, a bit of a rogue something more than mischievous and less than a cut-throat. A dog, in fine, after Darger’s own heart.

  Over drinks in a public house, Darger displayed his box and explained his intentions for it. Surplus warily touched the intricately carved teak housing, and then drew away from it. "You outline an intriguing scheme, Master Darger–"

  "Please. Call me Aubrey."

  "Aubrey, then. Yet here we have a delicate point. How shall we divide up the . . . ah, spoils of this enterprise? I hesitate to mention this, but many a promising partnership has foundered on precisely such shoals."

  Darger unscrewed the salt cellar and poured its contents onto the table. With his dagger, he drew a fine line down the middle of the heap. "I divide you choose. Or the other way around, if you please. From self-interest, you’ll not find a grain’s difference between the two."

  "Excellent!" cried Surplus and, dropping a pinch of salt in his beer, drank to the barga
in.

  It was raining when they left for Buckingham Labyrinth. Darger stared out the carriage window at the drear streets and worn buildings gliding by and sighed. "Poor, weary old London! History is a grinding-wheel that has been applied too many a time to thy face."

  "It is also," Surplus reminded him, "to be the making of our fortunes. Raise your eyes to the Labyrinth, sir, with its soaring towers and bright surfaces rising above these shops and flats like a crystal mountain rearing up out of a ramshackle wooden sea, and be comforted."

  "That is fine advice," Darger agreed. "But it cannot comfort a lover of cities, nor one of a melancholic turn of mind."

  "Pah!" cried Surplus, and said no more until they arrived at their destination.

  At the portal into Buckingham, the sergeant-interface strode forward as they stepped down from the carriage. He blinked at the sight of Surplus, but said only, "Papers?"

  Surplus presented the man with his passport and the credentials Darger had spent the morning forging, then added with a negligent wave of his paw, "And this is my autistic."

  The sergeant-interface glanced once at Darger, and forgot about him completely. Darger had the gift, priceless to one in his profession, of a face so nondescript that once someone looked away, it disappeared from that person’s consciousness forever. "This way, sir. The officer of protocol will want to examine these himself."

  A dwarf savant was produced to lead them through the outer circle of the Labyrinth. They passed by ladies in bioluminescent gowns and gentlemen with boots and gloves cut from leathers cloned from their own skin. Both women and men were extravagantly bejeweled for the ostentatious display of wealth was yet again in fashion and the halls were lushly clad and pillared in marble, porphyry, and jasper. Yet Darger could not help noticing how worn the carpets were, how chipped and sooted the oil lamps. His sharp eye espied the remains of an antique electrical system, and traces as well of telephone lines and fiber optic cables from an age when those technologies were yet workable.

  These last he viewed with particular pleasure.

  The dwarf savant stopped before a heavy black door carved over with gilt griffins, locomotives, and fleurs-de-lis. "This is a door," he said. "The wood is ebony. Its binomial is Diospyros ebenum. It was harvested in Serendip. The gilding is of gold. Gold has an atomic weight of 197.2."