Dog Tales

by Jack Dann

  Shlobber went out—miserably, I thought, but he often looked miserable. He was missing for a day and then I was telephoned by the Animal Shelter. He had been brought in dead, after being run over by a car that failed to stop. I asked them if they would bury him, and they agreed.

  Had he run under the wheels of the car deliberately, I wondered, in despair? Or been chivvied under them by the vengeful whippet-Blumstein? Suicide, or murder? Or accident? He had, after all, about as much road sense as a rhinoceros.

  The years went by, a little faster all the time, and Shlobber and my theories about him were pushed back into the unvisited departments of my mind and there collected dust. I have children growing up, and the past is less interesting just now than the present. But recently one of my daughters decided she wanted another budgerigar, and I went with her to the Bird Farm to buy it.

  There were several gigantic outdoor aviaries, and the proprietor had a net on the end of a long stick, to catch the bird she chose. He knew his budgerigars well, and was generous and helpful with advice. When she settled on a mauve bird, he said: “Just as you like, young lady. But that’s a cock.”

  She nodded. “I know—from the wattle.”

  “A hen’s best, for a bird by itself.”

  “But it’s not to be by itself. I’ve already got a hen. I want to breed from them.”

  “Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t pick that one. You go up along to the next cage. There’s some good ’uns there.”

  When she had left he said: “You know, it’s a funny thing, you get some cocks that are useless for breeding. Not interested in hens at all. Spend their time with other cock birds.” He grinned, shaking his head. “Queer, you might say.”

  I looked at the mauve bird. A kind of bulkiness to the set of the shoulders. De Percy? There were a group of them together up there in the corner of the aviary, amicably perched on a far-out twig of a barkless tree. A thin white one. Stenner? An emerald bird with a tatty, ungroomed look, and a fat portentous creature in sage-green. Parsons? And Birkinshaw?

  I looked for the two that were missing, but could not see them. Then there was a flash of colour across the aviary, a screeching of flight and pursuit—a small gray-blue pelting after a yellow with a bald patch on top.

  “That’s another thing,” the proprietor said. “The way one bird can take against another, for no reason you can see. Those two, for instance. That blue one leads the yellow bird a dog’s life.”

  At least they look prettier than they did.

  Dogs’ Lives

  by Michael Bishop

  People have spread across the globe in the tens of thousands of years of human history and pre-history, to the most remote corners of the earth, across the widest seas, and wherever they have gone, they have taken the dog with them. Can we doubt, then, that we will also take the dog along with us when we move off this earth as well, on the long and perilous journey to the stars . . .?

  Michael Bishop is one of the most acclaimed and respected members of that highly talented generation of writers who entered SF in the 1970s. His short fiction has appeared in almost all the major magazines and anthologies, and has been gathered in three collections: Blooded on Arcane, One Winter In Eden, and the recent Close Encounters with the Deity. In 1983, he won the Nebula Award for his novel No Enemy But Time. His other novels include Transfigurations, Stolen Faces, Ancient of Days, Catacomb Years, and Eyes of Fire. His most recent novel is The Secret Ascension. Upcoming is a new novel, Unicorn Mountain.

  Bishop and his family live in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

  * * *

  All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.

  —Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog”

  ###

  I AM TWENTY-SEVEN: Three weeks ago a black Great Dane stalked into my classroom as I was passing out theme topics. My students turned about to look. One of the freshman wits made an inane remark, which I immediately topped: “That may be the biggest dog I’ve ever seen.” Memorable retort. Two of my students sniggered.

  I ushered the Great Dane into the hall. As I held its collar and maneuvered it out of English 102 (surely it was looking for the foreign language department), the dog’s power and aloofness somehow coursed up my arm. Nevertheless, it permitted me to release it onto the north campus. Sinews, flanks, head. What a magnificent animal. It loped up the winter hillock outside Park Hall without looking back. Thinking on its beauty and self-possession, I returned to my classroom.

  And closed the door.

  ###

  TWENTY-SEVEN, AND HOLDING: All of this is true. The incident of the Great Dane has not been out of my thoughts since it happened. There is no door in my mind to close on the image of that enigmatic animal. It stalks into and out of my head whenever it wishes.

  As a result, I have begun to remember some painful things about dogs and my relationships with them. The memories are accompanied by premonitions. In fact, sometimes I—my secret self—go inside the Great Dane’s head and look through its eyes at tomorrow, or yesterday. Every bit of what I remember, every bit of what I foresee, throws light on my ties with both humankind and dogdom.

  Along with my wife, my fifteen-month-old son, and a ragged miniature poodle, I live in Athens, Georgia, in a rented house that was built before World War I. We have lived here seven months. In the summer we had bats. Twice I knocked the invaders out of the air with a broom and bludgeoned them to death against the dining-room floor. Now that it is winter the bats hibernate in the eaves, warmer than we are in our beds. The furnace runs all day and all night because, I suppose, no one had heard of insulation in 1910 and our fireplaces are all blocked up to keep out the bats.

  At night I dream about flying into the center of the sun on the back of a winged Great Dane.

  ###

  I AM EIGHT: Van Luna, Kansas. It is winter. At four o’clock in the morning a hand leads me down the cold concrete steps in the darkness of our garage. Against the wall, between a stack of automobile tires and a dismantled Ping Pong table, a pallet of rags on which the new puppies lie. Everything smells of dog flesh and gasoline. Outside the wind whips about frenetically, rattling the garage door.

  In robe and slippers I bend down to look at the furred-over lumps that huddle against one another on their rag pile. Frisky, their mother, regards me with suspicion. Adult hands have pulled her aside. Adult hands hold her back.

  “Pick one up,” a disembodied adult voice commands me.

  I comply.

  The puppy, almost shapeless, shivers in my hands, threatens to slide out of them onto the concrete. I press my cheek against the lump of fur and let its warm, faintly fecal odor slip into my memory. I have smelled this smell before.

  “Where are its eyes?”

  “Don’t worry, punkin,” the adult voice says. “It has eyes. They just haven’t opened yet.”

  The voice belongs to my mother. My parents have been divorced for three years.

  ###

  I AM FIVE: Our ship docks while it is snowing. We live in Tokyo, Japan: Mommy, Daddy, and I.

  Daddy comes home in a uniform that scratches my face when I grab his trouser leg. Government housing is where we live. On the lawn in the big yard between the houses I grab Daddy and ride his leg up to our front door. I am wearing a cowboy hat and empty holsters that go flap flap flap when I jump down and run inside.

  Christmas presents: I am a cowboy.

  The inside of the house gathers itself around me. A Japanese maid named Peanuts. (Such a funny name.) Mommy there, too. We have radio. My pistols are in the toy box. Later, not for Christmas, they give me my first puppy. It is never in the stuffy house, only on the porch. When Daddy and I go inside from playing with it the radio is singing “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” Everybody in Tokyo likes that song.

  The cowboy hat has a string with a bead to pull tight under my chin. I lose my hat anyway. Blackie runs off with the big dogs from the city. The pistols stay shiny in my toy b
ox.

  On the radio, always singing, is Patti Page.

  ###

  DOGS I HAVE KNOWN: Blackie, Frisky, Wiggles, Seagull, Mike, Pat, Marc, Boo Boo, Susie, Mandy, Heathcliff, Pepper, Sam, Trixie, Andy, Taffy, Tristram, Squeak, Christy, Fritz, Blue, Tammi, Napoleon, Nickie, B.J., Viking, Tau, and Canicula, whom I sometimes call Threasie (or 3C, short, you see. for Cybernetic Canine Construct).

  “Sorry. There are no more class cards for this section of 102.”

  How the spurned dogs bark, how they howl.

  ###

  I AM FOURTEEN: Cheyenne Canyon, Colorado. It is August. My father and I are driving up the narrow canyon road toward Helen Hunt Falls. Dad’s Labrador retriever Nick—too conspicuously my namesake—rides with us. The dog balances with his hind legs on the back seat and lolls his massive head out the driver’s window, his dark mouth open to catch the wind. Smart, gentle, trained for the keen competition of field trials, Nick is an animal that I can scarcely believe belongs to us—even if he is partially mine only three months out of the year, when I visit my father during the summer.

  The radio, turned up loud, tells us that the Russians have brought back to Earth from an historic mission the passengers of Sputnik V, the first two animals to be recovered safely from orbit.

  They, of course, are dogs. Their names are Belka and Strelka, the latter of whom will eventually have six puppies as proof of her power to defy time as well as space.

  “How ’bout that, Nick?” my father says. “How’d you like to go free-fallin’ around the globe with a pretty little bitch?”

  Dad is talking to the retriever, not to me. He calls me Nicholas. Nick, however, is not listening. His eyes are half-shut against the wind, his ears flowing silkenly in the slipstream behind his aristocratic head.

  I laugh in delight. Although puberty has not yet completely caught up with me, my father treats me like an equal. Sometimes on Saturday, when we’re watching Dizzy Dean on “The Game of the Week,” he gives me my own can of beer.

  We park and climb the stone steps that lead to a little bridge above the falls. Nick runs on ahead of us. Very few tourists are about. Helen Hunt Falls is more picturesque than imposing; the bridge hangs only a few feet over the mountain stream roaring and plunging beneath it. Hardly a Niagara. Nick looks down without fear, and Dad says, “Come on, Nicholas. There’s a better view on up the mountain.”

  We cross the bridge and struggle up the hillside above the tourist shop, until the pine trunks, which we pull ourselves up by, have finally obscured the shop and the winding canyon road. Nick still scrambles ahead of us, causing small avalanches of sand and loose soil.

  Higher up, a path. We can look across the intervening blueness at a series of falls that drop down five or six tiers of sloping granite and disappear in a mist of trees. In only a moment, it seems, we have walked to the highest tier.

  My father sits me down with an admonition to stay put. “I’m going down to the next slope, Nicholas, to see if I can see how many falls there are to the bottom. Look out through the trees there. I’ll bet you can see Kansas.”

  “Be careful,” I urge him.

  The water sliding over the rocks beside me is probably not even an inch deep, but I can easily tell that below the next sloping of granite the entire world falls away into a canyon of blue-green.

  Dad goes down the slope. I notice that Nick, as always, is preceding him. On the margin of granite below, the dog stops and waits. My father joins Nick, puts his hands on his hips, bends at the waist, and looks down into an abyss altogether invisible to me. How far down it drops I cannot tell, but the echo of falling water suggests no inconsequential distance.

  Nick wades into the silver flashing from the white rocks. Before I can shout warning, he lowers his head to drink. The current is not strong—these falls are not torrents—but wet stone provides no traction and the Lab’s feet go slickly out from under him. His body twists about, and he begins to slide inexorably through the slow silver.

  “Dad! Dad!” I am standing.

  My father belatedly sees what is happening. He reaches out to grab at his dog. He nearly topples. He loses his red golf cap.

  And then Nick’s body drops, his straining head and forepaws are pulled after. The red golf cap follows him down, an ironic afterthought.

  I am weeping. My father stands upright and throws his arms above his head. “Oh my dear God!” he cries. “Oh my dear God!” The canyon echoes these words, and suddenly the universe has changed.

  Time stops.

  Then begins again.

  Miraculously, even anti-climactically, Nick comes limping up to us from the hell to which we had both consigned him. He comes limping up through the pines. His legs and flanks tremble violently. His coat is matted and wet, like a newborn puppy’s. When he reaches us he seems not even to notice that we are there to care for him, to take him back down the mountain into Colorado Springs.

  “He fell at least a hundred yards, Nicholas,” my father says. “At least that—onto solid rock.”

  On the bridge above Helen Hunt Falls we meet a woman with a Dalmatian. Nick growls at the Dalmatian, his hackles in an aggressive fan. But in the car he stretches out on the back seat and ignores my attempts to console him. My father and I do not talk. We are certain that there must be internal injuries. We drive the regal Lab—AKC designation, “Black Prince Nicholas”—almost twenty miles to the veterinarian’s at the Air Force Academy.

  Like Belka and Strelka, he survives.

  ###

  SNAPSHOT: Black Prince Nicholas returning to my father through the slate-grey verge of a Wyoming lake, a wounded mallard clutched tenderly in his jaws. The photograph is grainy, but the huge Labrador resembles a panther coming out of creation’s first light: he is the purest distillation of power.

  ###

  ROLL CALL FOR SPRING QUARTER: I walk into the classroom with my new roll sheets and the same well-thumbed textbook. As usual, my new students regard me with a mixture of curiosity and dispassionate calculation. But there is something funny about them this quarter.

  Something not right.

  Uneasily, I begin calling the alphabetized list of their names. “Andy . . . B.J. . . . Blackie . . . Blue . . . Boo Boo . . .Canicula . . . Christy . . . Frisky . . .”

  Each student responds with an inarticulate yelp rather than a healthy “Here!” As I proceed down the roll, the remainder of the class dispenses with even this courtesy. I have a surly bunch on my hands. A few have actually begun to snarl.

  “. . . Pepper . . . Sam . . . Seagull . . . Squeak . . .”

  They do not let me finish. From the front row a collie leaps out of his seat and crashes against my lectern. I am borne to the floor by his hurtling body. Desperately I try to protect my throat.

  The small classroom shakes with the thunder of my students’ barking, and I can tell that all the animals on my roll have fallen upon me with the urgency of their own peculiar blood-lusts.

  The fur flies. Me, they viciously devour.

  Before the lights go out completely, I tell myself that it is going to be a very difficult quarter. A very difficult quarter indeed.

  ###

  I AM FORTY-SIX: Old for an athlete, young for a president, maybe optimum for an astronaut. I am learning new tricks.

  The year is 1992, and it has been a long time since I have taught freshman English or tried my hand at spinning monstrously improbable tales. (With the exception, of course, of this one.) I have been too busy.

  After suffering a ruptured aneurysm while delivering a lecture in the spring of 1973, I underwent surgery and resigned from the English department faculty. My recovery took eight or nine months.

  Outfitted with several vascular prostheses and wired for the utmost mobility, I returned to the university campus to pursue simultaneous majors in molecular biology and astrophysics. The GI Bill and my wife’s and my parents footed the largest part of our expenses—at the beginning, at least. Later, when I volunteered for a government p
rogram involving cybernetic experimentation with human beings (reasoning that the tubes in my brain were a good start on becoming a cyborg, anyway), money ceased to be a problem.

  This confidential program changed me. In addition to the synthetic blood vessels in my brain, I picked up three artificial internal organs, a transparent skull cap, an incomplete auxiliary skeletal system consisting of resilient inert plastics, and a pair of removable visual adaptors that plug into a plate behind my brow and so permit me to see expertly in the dark. I can even eat wood if I have to. I can learn the most abstruse technical matters without even blinking my adaptors. I can jump off a three-story building without even jarring my kneecaps. These skills, as you may imagine, come in handy.

  With a toupee, a pair of dark glasses, and a little cosmetic surgery, I could leave the government hospitals where I had undergone these changes and take up a seat in any classroom in any university in the nation. I was frequently given leave to do so. Entrance requirements were automatically waived, I never saw a fee card, and not once did my name fail to appear on the rolls of any of the classes I sat in on.

  I studied everything. I made A-pluses in everything. I could read a textbook from cover to cover in thirty minutes and recall even the footnotes verbatim. I awed professors who had worked for thirty-forty years in chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy. It was the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy come true, and not all of it can be attributed to the implanted electrodes, the enzyme inoculations, and the brain meddlings of the government cyberneticists. No, I have always had a talent for doing things thoroughly.