The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Oh.” Benji said, and then he wagged his tail once, which was his way of nodding. “Not all dogs same.” He’d learned that lesson trying to chat with the neighborhood dogs, none of whom were sentientized.

  “Lots of dogs can’t watch TV, like you do,” Jen said, absentmindedly fiddling with one of Marty’s cartoon DVD cases on the kitchen table.

  “Right,” he said, and he asked, “But why not?”

  Before she could answer him, I stepped into the room and said, “Is Benji watching TV?”

  Jen looked up. She looked tired. “Yeah, I leave the dog channel on when I’m out. It’s supposed to help his English.”

  “I talk good soon,” Benji says, and like that it clicked in my head: the shift to four- and five-word sentences I’d observed, the slightly improved syntax. Dogs with the treatment he’d gotten weren’t supposed to advance that far, let alone become fluent, but at the rate he was going, he’d be speaking like Marty within the year.

  “Yes, Benji. You’re really improving. Now, your Daddy and I need to talk about something private, Benji. Could you excuse us?”

  “Okay,” Benji said. “Night,” he told each of us one by one, and then he padded off into the basement.

  When the creaking on the stairs ended, Jen and I both exhaled. We hadn’t even realized we’d been holding our breath.

  “It’s like…” she started, but then she hesitated, though I knew what she was going to say.

  “… like having two kids?” I suggested.

  She nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Well, that was why he had him done, you know…”

  She nodded, and it hit me how much older she looked now, than when we’d decided against adoption, and when she’d finally agreed to the dog treatment. If we’d known … well, there was no point in thinking about that, was there?

  “So, the whole Koreans eating dogs thing … you think he picked that up on TV, maybe?”

  Jen tapped the kitchen table. “Maybe? I’ve never watched any myself.” I looked at the DVD case sitting on the table in front of her, and it hit me: with Marty, we checked everything out first. If he asked for a movie, we checked the parental warnings. There was a nanny lock on the TV, too, a smart lock set to block anything PG-13 or higher when he was alone in the room. But we hadn’t set a lock for when it was just Benji alone.

  “Well, maybe we should.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I found Benji on the couch in front of the TV. A commercial was on. I’d never seen an ad made especially for dogs. Before that day, I’d only ever glimpsed these weird canine-athletics shows Benji loved, that always sent Benji straight to me, insistently repeating, “Let’s play fetch! Let’s play fetch! Wanna play fetch?”

  In this ad, a pair of dogs were trotting alongside one another, as soft romantic music played in the background. There was also this soft panting sound, and a kind of rhythmic thumping that didn’t fit the music. “Lonely? Humping legs not good enough for you? Are you the only talking dog in your neighborhood? Most sentientized canines have trouble finding suitable mates. But we can help you. Call PetMate today.” An online contact code flashed across the bottom of the screen, as the screen cut smoothly, if briefly, to one dog mounting another; as the video quickly faded to black, a faint, slightly offensive aroma filled the room, and then quickly dissipated. Beside me, Benji was suddenly panting.

  Great, I thought. Next he’ll be asking me for allowance money.…

  But the screen shifted abruptly to a stage set with wide, soft-looking red couches. On one sat a beautiful grey-furred German Shepherd, a big chew-bone under her front paws, cans and packets of some new brand of dog food, Brainy Dog Chow, visible in various places around her.

  “Good morning,” started the voiceover, “and welcome back to Sparky’s Couch!” The camera zoomed in on Sparky’s face as she—her voice was somehow feminine—sniffed at the camera, and the TV’s odifers emitting what I swear was the faint aroma of dog-butt. Suddenly, that weird smell I’d noticed sometimes in the living room made sense. I’d thought it was just Benji.

  “I’m your host, Sparky Smith,” the German Shepherd said in astonishingly perfect English. She must have had the top-of-the-line treatment. “I hope you’re comfortably seated on your families’ couches, too. Well, yesterday you heard about the plight of Korean dogs from the first Korean sentientized dog, Somi. But it wouldn’t be fair to talk about Korea and ignoring problems closer to home.…”

  My jaw dropped. She sounded like a human TV announcer. The cost of her treatment must have been exorbitant … or had she been gotten of those pricy in vitro mods? Looking at Benji, I felt like … was it wrong of us to get him the cheaper treatment? Did he realize he’d never be able to talk like Sparky?

  “Well, according to today’s expert, America has a serious dog-mistreatment problem as well! Even here, dogs suffer every day. Everyone please welcome Duncan Mallory, from Iowa,” Sparky declared.

  The camera cut to an audience full of dogs lounging on the terraced studio audience floor area. They were all barking rhythmically, oof, oof, oof, like it was applause, and Benji was barking along with them. A squat brown pug waddled onstage, and then hopped up onto the couch beside Sparky. As they sniffed one another in greeting, a new dog-butt aroma wafted from the TV odifers. Well, I guess it was new: it smelled the same as the last one, to me.

  “Welcome, Duncan! It’s nice to have you here,” Sparky said.

  “Thanks, Sparky. I’m happy to be here.” The pug’s voice was even clearer than Sparky’s, with very little accent. It was weird.

  “Please tell us how you discovered about the suffering of American dogs, Duncan.”

  Melodramatically sad piano music began to play, as the dog spoke. “Well, I was surfing the internet, and thought that I’d look up the ASPCA—you know, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”

  “Right,” Sparky replied. The acronym appeared at the bottom of the screen, and stayed in place for what seemed like a long time. Maybe it was to let even the least-enhanced dogs—dogs like Benji—to memorize the shapes of the letters.

  “After searching around their webpage, I discovered something incredible,” he said. The audience and Sparky—and Benji—panted expectantly. “Millions of dogs are killed with poison injections every year, right here in America. It’s been going on for decades, too.”

  All of the dogs in the audience yelped in horror. Sparky covered her nose with a paw, and made a whining sound. Then she asked, “Why?”

  “Because they’re homeless. Nobody owns them, and nobody wants them, so they’re killed,” the pug explained, his voice turning a little angry.

  The audience began whining, and Benji joined them. The sad music continued, as a video montage filled the screen. At first it was just ankles and knees, which confused me until I realized it was dog’s eye view. The room was filled with a vaguely metallic smell, mixed with the bite of chemical cleaning solution and, faintly, some other offensive aroma—like old piss and sickened animal turds. Onscreen flashed the faces of miserable dogs framed by the bars of cages, one after another in an interminable sequence. The camera entered another room, where a dog lay on its side on a table, its legs visible hanging over the edge from above. Benji whined softly, I think unaware that he was doing it.

  “This is where they inject the dogs,” Duncan explained.

  This was too much, I decided, and I reached for the NetTV remote next to Benji’s paw.

  Benji stopped whining along with the audience and looked at me in surprise. “Why?

  “Why what?”

  “Why…” He paused, as if trying to figure out what he was asking about. Why turn the TV off? Why do they kill dogs that way? Why is the world so unfair? He whined again, this time less unselfconscious. His head hung down, his eyes wide and sorrowful.

  “Benji, I dunno what to tell you. We try to treat you well, but not everyone in the world is like us.”

  Benji didn’t say anything
, but he stared at me with this piercing look, as if my explanation wasn’t good enough.

  “Look, those dogs would … go hungry. They would be homeless, and starve,” I said.

  Benji sat there, looking at me. He knew the word homeless. Whenever we went to the vet’s downtown, we always passed a couple of homeless people. He had talked to one of them, some old war vet who’d had PTSD and couldn’t stand to live indoors anymore.

  “You don’t kill homeless people,” Benji said softly.

  “No, Benj, we don’t. Some people probably wish we did, but we don’t. Because they’re people.”

  Benji whimpered at me, and snuffed a little, then looked up at me and said, “Am I a people?”

  “Of course you are, Benji,” I said, without even pausing to think. I didn’t add the rest of what I was thinking, You can talk. You can think. He turned and looked at me, his eyes like those of a dog walleyed from sneaking a half-box of forbidden, dog-toxic chocolate.

  This wouldn’t do. It was Saturday, sunny and bright outside.

  “Say, Benji, whaddaya think about going to the park?” He wagged his tail a little weakly. “C’mon boy, let’s go ask Jen, then,” I said, and we got up and walked to the top of the stairs.

  “Jen, wanna go for a picnic?” I shouted down the stairs, and she called up to me that she thought it was a great idea, and only needed a few minutes to finish up her work. I went to get Marty ready.

  Half an hour later, we had a simple lunch packed and were on our way, Marty and Benji in the backseat of the microvan and Jen and I in the front, driving across town to Volunteer Park. We played kids’ music all the way, songs about bananas and monkeys and chickens dancing and some guy named Pickles O’Sullivan. Marty talked to Benji about a book he was reading—about a group of kid spies who were constantly saving the world from scheming corporations and politicians—and Jen smiled at me. This was a great idea, I thought to myself.

  When we got there, I took Benji off his leash and let him run around for a while, and told him to come and find me near the benches when he’d had enough. Jen and Marty and I sat on a blanket, ate some tuna salad sandwiches and some fresh fruit we’d bought from an organic produce stand along the way. Then I kicked a ball around with Marty for a while—he was too small to kick it back properly, but he wasn’t too small to intercept it, if I kicked softly enough.

  When the sun had started to go down, though, Benji still hadn’t returned. Usually when we picnicked, he stayed around, or came back soon, but this time, there was no sign of him for hours.

  “Where do you think he is?” Jen asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe he found some girl dogs or something?” I grinned.

  “That’s not funny. You know, I read that someone’s been kidnapping sentient dogs. They’ve been disappearing from all over. It’s terrible.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll go find him. He’s gotta be around somewhere.” And with that, I left the two of them sitting on the picnic blanket.

  I wandered around the park, calling out his name and looking in any place I could think of where he might be. He wasn’t by the old bandstand with the faded paint, or the new jungle gyms; I couldn’t find him anywhere near the mini-museum or the tennis courts; and he wasn’t out by the viewpoint overlooking Puget Sound. I asked everyone I ran across, and nobody had seen him, though even if they had, would they have noticed him?

  Finally, on the opposite end of the park from where Jen and Marty were waiting, I followed a trail that ran right between a couple of lazy old pine trees and over a small rise. When I got to the top, I could hear a loud voice—a dog’s voice—accompanied by murmurs. I came down the hill, and in the dimming light I saw a pack of dogs all sitting together in a circle, gathered around a big white husky that seemed to be orating to them. Every once in a while, they responded in unison, with a jolting yelp or bark. It was too dim to see the dogs in the pack clearly, but Benji had to be there somewhere. Ignoring a faint sense that I was trespassing, I moved down the hill.

  As I got closer, the oration got clearer: “And besides, the issue is, humans do not think of us as people. How many of you have ever shit indoors?”

  The dogs muttered among themselves, and then most of them replied, one by one, “I have.”

  “And what happened? Your master rubbed your nose in it, and threw you outside. Do they do that to babies who crap in their diapers?”

  The consensus, quickly reached, was a resounding No.

  “The thing to remember, to understand, is that humans will never, ever see us as we see ourselves. They think they love us, but…” The dogs yelped affirmatively in response.

  “Benji?” I interrupted, after the howls had died off and before the husky could continue. I guess I must have been downwind or something, or maybe talking and listening took so much of their brainpower that they paid less attention to scent, because they suddenly all turned and looked at me in what felt like surprise. Having all those eyes on me was nerve-wracking. Some dogs bared their teeth, growling softly, and I half-expected to become an example in the husky’s diatribe, or for him to order them to attack me.

  But they all just stood there, looking at me angrily until Benji turned and trotted from the pack of them over toward me.

  “Come on, Benji,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  He said nothing, but followed me quietly, and I only looked over my shoulder once. They didn’t follow us, but instead just sat there, silently watching us go.

  Laws or no laws, I didn’t leash him. I didn’t even dare try.

  * * *

  He ran away a week later.

  It was the Fourth of July—Independence Day, of all days—and it was our turn to play host among enough of our circles of friends that we decided to just invite them all at once.

  The scent of grilling meat and smoke wafted through the backyard. One of the coolers of beer sat open, bottles nestled in the ice and left in the glaring sun. Random groups of friends and strangers chatted with one another in small clusters, sitting on lawn chairs or leaning on the railing of the deck. I could hear Jen laughing about something, and Marty was with the other kids in the sandbox, steering little matchbox cars along hastily constructed little sandy race courses.

  At some point, I heard a crash from inside the house. I looked up from the grill, where I was tending to the burgers, and called to Jen, but she couldn’t hear me over the music. I handed the spatula to Deke, and went inside to check it out.

  I found Benji sitting miserably in the bathroom. The now-smashed sink, which had never been properly attached to the wall, had been knocked down and cracked the tile floor, and the naked water-pipes were broken off and dripping water. The small vase of flowers that sat on the toilet tank had fallen down, and the flowers floated here and there on the water that covered the floor. The vase had smashed into a million shards, too, I realized as I looked carefully. There were dog turds on the toilet seat, and floating in the water flooding the floor. Thank goodness the smart house system registered that the flow was too high on the pipe, and shut the water valve access for the sink, but it was still going to be a pain to clean up the room, let alone fix everything. So I did the thing parents sometimes do, and regret forever.

  “What the hell, Benji?” I shouted. But wouldn’t anyone have yelled? A new sink, fixing the plumbing, retiling the floor: none of that would be free. “You’re not supposed to use the toilet, dammit! You’re a dog!” I grabbed a rolled-up newspaper from the bathroom magazine rack and whacked him on the nose with it.

  “But … there’s too many people now…” he said, sadly.

  “No, Benji. No. You’re a dog, okay? You’re supposed to do it outside.…”

  He didn’t say anything, but just stalked out of the room with baleful eyes, to the back door, watching solemnly as I went and got the wet’n’dry vac and sucked up most of the mess. Quickly, I wrote up a sign to use the bathroom upstairs, and then locked the bathroom door so nobody would walk into the disaster zone by
accident.

  When I got to the back door, I realized that the poor dog had been stuck inside for hours. Even if nobody had been around, we hadn’t let him out anyway. A sudden sinking guilt set in. “Okay, Benji, I’ll let you out. Sorry, I forgot to. Just do your business outside next time, okay? Bark or shout and I’ll come let you out.”

  He mumbled something low, something I couldn’t make out, as I opened the door and he went out into the backyard. I hoped the crowd would cheer him up, maybe. He took off toward the yard, not waiting for me. I wondered, Is this what teenagers are like?

  Outside, Lorna was saying, “Well, now, Benji, you’re much better behaved than the last time I saw you. I almost wish I’d brought my Spot to come play with you.”

  “Play?” Benji yelped. “I’m not a baby dog! You think I’m stupid?”

  “Pardon me?” Lorna said, and I could hear Jen’s shocked response: “Benji!”

  Goddammit, I swear that was what I thought. Not, “Hey, Lorna, Benji’s a little different from Spot,” or, “Wait, everyone, let’s talk about this.” Just, Goddammit.

  “No, it’s alright,” Lorna said, adjusting her sunhat. “I’m not sure I understand, Benji. Are you telling me you don’t like to play? That if, say, I throw this rubber ball over there, you won’t go and get it? Every dog loves to play fetch, right?” She picked up a rubber ball from the grass and threw it over toward the back fence.

  Benji sat on his haunches, looking, watching the ball roll away. Then, without another word, he stood and walked over toward her, like he was going to graze her leg with his side.

  As she said, “Good boy,” and reached down with her free hand to pat him on the head, he raised one leg and sprayed piss onto her white leather shoes.

  Lorna jumped back, dropping her plate on the ground, its contents tumbling onto the grass. Everyone was quiet, the music a paradoxically cheerful background to the concerned, shocked faces. Even Marty and his friends had stopped playing race cars to look over at the scene.