The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007
Page 82
I went out very early one morning to look for food. Before dawn was safest for a woman alone. The boy-gangs had gone to bed, tired of attacking each other. The trucks from the city hadn’t arrived yet. That meant the garbage was pretty picked over, but it also meant most of the refugee camp wasn’t out scavenging. Most days I could find enough: a carrot stolen from somebody’s garden patch, my arm bloody from reaching through the barbed wire. Overlooked potato peelings under a pile of rags and glass. A can of stew thrown away by one of the soldiers on the base, but still half full. Soldiers on duty by the Dome were often careless. They got bored, with nothing to do.
That morning was cool but fair, with a pearly haze that the sun would burn off later. I wore all my clothing, for warmth, and my boots. Yesterday’s garbage load, I’d heard somebody say, was huge, so I had hopes. I hiked to my favorite spot, where garbage spills almost to the Dome wall. Maybe I’d find bread, or even fruit that wasn’t too rotten.
Instead I found the puppy.
Its eyes weren’t open yet and it squirmed along the bare ground, a scrawny brown-and-white mass with a tiny fluffy tail. Nearby was a fluid-soaked towel. Some sentimental fool had left the puppy there, hoping … what? It didn’t matter. Scrawny or not, there was some meat on the thing. I scooped it up.
The sun pushed above the horizon, flooding the haze with golden light.
I hate it when grief seizes me. I hate it and it’s dangerous, a violation of one of Jill’s Laws of Survival. I can go for weeks, months without thinking of my life before the War. Without remembering or feeling. Then something will strike me—a flower growing in the dump, a burst of birdsong, the stars on a clear night—and grief will hit me like the maglevs that no longer exist, a grief all the sharper because it contains the memory of joy. I can’t afford joy, which always comes with an astronomical price tag. I can’t even afford the grief that comes from the memory of living things, which is why it is only the flower, the birdsong, the morning sunlight that starts it. My grief was not for that puppy. I still intended to eat it.
But I heard a noise behind me and turned. The Dome wall was opening.
Who knew why the aliens put their Domes by garbage dumps, by waste pits, by radioactive cities? Who knew why aliens did anything?
There was a widespread belief in the camp that the aliens started the War. I’m old enough to know better. That was us, just like the global warming and the bio-crobes were us. The aliens didn’t even show up until the War was over and Raleigh was the northernmost city left on the East Coast and refugees poured south like mudslides. Including me. That’s when the ships landed and then turned into the huge gray Domes like upended bowls. I heard there were many Domes, some in other countries. The Army, what was left of it, threw tanks and bombs at ours. When they gave up, the refugees threw bullets and Molotov cocktails and prayers and graffiti and candlelight vigils and rain dances. Everything slid off and the Domes just sat there. And sat. And sat. Three years later, they were still sitting, silent and closed, although of course there were rumors to the contrary. There are always rumors. Personally, I’d never gotten over a slight disbelief that the Dome was there at all. Who would want to visit us?
The opening was small, no larger than a porthole, and about six feet above the ground. All I could see inside was a fog the same color as the Dome. Something came out, gliding quickly toward me. It took me a moment to realize it was a robot, a blue metal sphere above a hanging basket. It stopped a foot from my face and said, “This food for this dog.”
I could have run, or screamed, or at the least—the very least—looked around for a witness. I didn’t. The basket held a pile of fresh produce, green lettuce and deep purple eggplant and apples so shiny red they looked lacquered. And peaches … My mouth filled with sweet water. I couldn’t move.
The puppy whimpered.
My mother used to make fresh peach pie.
I scooped the food into my scavenger bag, laid the puppy in the basket, and backed away. The robot floated back into the Dome, which closed immediately. I sped back to my corrugated-tin and windowless hut and ate until I couldn’t hold any more. I slept, woke, and ate the rest, crouching in the dark so nobody else would see. All that fruit and vegetables gave me the runs, but it was worth it.
Peaches.
Two weeks later, I brought another puppy to the Dome, the only survivor of a litter deep in the dump. I never knew what happened to the mother. I had to wait a long time outside the Dome before the blue sphere took the puppy in exchange for produce. Apparently the Dome would only open when there was no one else around to see. What were they afraid of? It’s not like PETA was going to show up.
The next day I traded three of the peaches to an old man in exchange for a small, mangy poodle. We didn’t look each other in the eye, but I nonetheless knew that his held tears. He limped hurriedly away. I kept the dog, which clearly wanted nothing to do with me, in my shack until very early morning and then took it to the Dome. It tried to escape but I’d tied a bit of rope onto its frayed collar. We sat outside the Dome in mutual dislike, waiting, as the sky paled slightly in the east. Gunshots sounded in the distance.
I have never owned a dog.
When the Dome finally opened, I gripped the dog’s rope and spoke to the robot. “Not fruit. Not vegetables. I want eggs and bread.”
The robot floated back inside.
Instantly I cursed myself. Eggs? Bread? I was crazy not to take what I could get. That was Law of Survival #1. Now there would be nothing. Eggs, bread … crazy. I glared at the dog and kicked it. It yelped, looked indignant, and tried to bite my boot.
The Dome opened again and the robot glided toward me. In the gloom I couldn’t see what was in the basket. In fact, I couldn’t see the basket. It wasn’t there. Mechanical tentacles shot out from the sphere and seized both me and the poodle. I cried out and the tentacles squeezed harder. Then I was flying through the air, the stupid dog suddenly howling beneath me, and we were carried through the Dome wall and inside.
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 crossbars, 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, “T
hese 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?”
“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 toward a cesspool. A big dog with a 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.
“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 know.
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, for to make these dogs behave correctly.”
Long pause; my sentence had a lot of grammatical elements. But finally Blue said, “Yes.”