Dog Tales

by Jack Dann

  Today is March the fifth, and this morning Katherine took our little boy out to see Tammi’s three-week-old puppies. They have a warm, faintly fecal odor, but their eyes are open and Peter played with them as if they were stuffed stockings come to life. He had never seen anything quite like them before, and Katherine says that he cried when she brought him in.

  ###

  I AM AGELESS: A beautiful, kind-cruel planet revolves about Sirius. I have given this world the name Elsinore because the name is noble, and because the rugged fairness of her seascapes and islands calls up the image of a more heroic era than any we have known on Earth of late.

  Three standard days ago, seven of our trace-teams descended into the atmosphere of Elsinore. One trace-team remains aboard the Black Retriever to speed our evangelical message to you, our brethren, back home. Shortly, we hope to retrieve many of you to this brave new world in Canis Major.

  Thanks to the flight capabilities of our cybernetic dogs, we have explored nearly all of Elsinore in three days’ time. We divided the planet into hemispheres and the hemispheres into quadrants, and each trace-team flew cartographic and exploratory missions over its assigned area. Canicula and I took upon ourselves the responsibility of charting two of the quadrants, since only seven teams were available for this work, and as a result he and I first spotted and made contact with the indigenous Elsinorians.

  As we skimmed over a group of breathtakingly stark islands in a northern sea, the heat-detecting unit in Canicula’s belly gave warning of this life. Incredulous, we made several passes over the islands.

  Each time we plummeted, the sea shimmered beneath us like windblown silk. As we searched the islands’ coasts and heartlands, up-jutting rocks flashed by us on every side. And each time we plummeted, our heat sensors told us that sentient beings did indeed dwell in this archipelago.

  At last we pinpointed their location.

  Canicula hovered for a time. “You ready to be wagged?” he asked me.

  “Wag away,” I replied.

  We dropped five hundred meters straight down and then settled gently into the aliens’ midst: a natural senate of stone, open to the sky, in which the Elsinorians carry on the simple affairs of their simple state.

  The Elsinorians are dogs. Dogs very like Canicula-Threasie. They lack, of course, the instrumentation that so greatly intensifies the experience of the cyborg. They are creatures of nature who have subdued themselves to reason and who have lived out their apparently immortal lives in a spirit of rational expectation. For millennia they have waited, patiently waited.

  Upon catching sight of me, every noble animal in their open-air senate began wagging his or her close-cropped tail. All eyes were upon me.

  By himself, Canicula sought out the Elsinorians’ leader and immediately began conversing with him (no doubt implementing our Advance Strategem for First Contact.) You see, Canicula did not require the assistance of our instantaneous translator; he and the alien dog shared a heritage more fundamental than language. I stood to one side and waited for their conference to conclude.

  “His name translates as Prince,” Canicula said upon returning to me, “even though their society is democratic. He wishes to address us before all of the assembled senators of his people. Let’s take up a seat among them. You can plug into the translator. The Elsinorians, Nicholas, recognize the full historical impact of this occasion, and Prince may have a surprise or two for you, dear Master.”

  Having said this, 3C grinned. Damned irritating.

  We nevertheless took up our seats among the Elsinorian dogs, and Prince strolled with great dignity onto the senate floor. The I.T. System rendered his remarks as several lines of nearly impeccable blank verse. English blank verse, of course. PRINCE:

  Fragmented by the lack of any object

  Beyond ourselves to beat for, our sundered hearts

  Thud in a vacuum not of our making.

  We are piecemeal beasts, supple enough

  To look upon, illusorily whole;

  But all this heartsore time, down the aeons

  Illimitable of our incompleteness,

  We have awaited this, your arrival,

  Men and Dogs of Earth.

  And you, Canicula,

  We especially thank for bringing to us

  The honeyed prospect of Man’s companionship.

  Tell your Master that we hereby invite

  His kinspeople to our stern but unspoiled world

  To be the medicine which heals the lesions

  In our shambled hearts.

  Together we shall share

  Eternity, deathless on Elsinore!

  And so he concluded. The senators, their natural reticence overcome, barked, bayed, and bellowed their approval. That was earlier this afternoon. Canicula-Threasie and I told the Elsinorians that we would carry their message to the other trace-teams and, eventually, to the people of Earth. Then we rose above their beautifully barbaric island and flew into the eye of Sirius, a ball of sinking fire on the windy sea’s westernmost rim.

  Tonight we are encamped on the peak of a great mountain on one of the islands of the archipelago. The air is brisk, but not cold. To breathe here is to ingest energy.

  Peter, Erin, Katherine—I call you to this place. No one dies on Elsinore, no one suffers more than he can bear, no one suffocates in the pettiness of day-to-day existence. That is what I had hoped for. That is why I came here. That is why I sacrificed, on the altar of this dream, so much of what I was before my aneurysm ruptured. And now the dream has come true, and I call you to Elsinore.

  Canicula and I make our beds on a lofty slab of granite above a series of waterfalls tumbling to the sea. The mist from these waterfalls boils up beneath us. We stretch out to sleep.

  “No more suffering,” I say.

  “No more wasted potential,” Canicula says.

  “No more famine, disease, or death,” I say, looking at the cold stars and trying to find the cruel one upon which my beloved family even yet depends.

  Canicula then says, “Tempus?”

  “Yes?” I reply.

  “Fug it!” he barks.

  And we both go to sleep with laughter on our lips.

  ###

  TWENTY-SEVEN AND COUNTING: I have renewed my contract for the coming year. You have to put food on the table. I am three weeks into spring quarter already, and my students are students like other students. I like some of them, dislike others.

  I will enjoy teaching them Othello once we get to it. Thank God our literature text does not contain Hamlet. I would find myself making hideous analogies between the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the Great Dane who haunted my thoughts all winter quarter.

  I am over that now. Dealing with the jealous Moor again will be, in the terminology of our astronauts, “a piece of cake.”

  Katherine’s pregnancy is in its fourth month now, and Peter has begun to talk a little more fluently. Sort of. The words he knows how to say include Dada, juice, and dog. Dog, in fact, is the first word that he ever clearly spoke. Appropriate.

  In fifteen years—or eleven, or seventeen—I probably will not be able to remember a time when Peter could not talk. Or Erin, either, for that matter, even though she has not been born yet. For now all a father can do is live his life and, loving them, let his children—born and unborn—live their own.

  “Dog!” my son emphatically cries. “Dog!”

  Here, Putzi!

  by Fletcher Pratt & L. Sprague DeCamp

  The tall tale is one of the oldest forms of expression and the tall tale told in a bar is a tradition that must go back nearly to the dawn of civilization. After a few thousand years of inebriated conversation, braggadocio, and straight-faced “whoppers,” it occurred to somebody to write some of this stuff down, and the literary mode known as the “bar story” was born. In SF and fantasy, the “bar story” or “club story” has a long and venerable tradition, including work by Lord Dunsany (his many stories of the clubman Jorkens), Arthur C. Clarke (Tale
s From the White Hart), Sterling Lanier (The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes), Spider Robinson (Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon), Isaac Asimov (Tales of the Black Widowers), Larry Niven (the Draco Tavern stories), and many others. To true fantasy connoisseurs, however, perhaps the best-known series of bar stories are those collected in Tales From Gavagan’s Bar by L. Sprague DeCamp and Fletcher Pratt.

  DeCamp and Pratt formed one of the most accomplished collaborative teams in the history of imaginative literature, writing, in addition to the Gavagan’s Bar stories, the Harold Shea books, The Incompleate Enchanter, Castle of Iron, and Wall of Serpents, as well as novels such as the fantasy classic Land of Unreason and The Carnelian Cube. On his own, Pratt wrote The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star. DeCamp, of course, is a seminal figure in the development of both modern fantasy and science fiction, as was acknowledged by his recent receipt of the World Fantasy Award, the prestigious Life Achievement Award. His most famous books include Lest Darkness Fall, Rogue Queen, and The Hand of Zei.

  Here they show that every dog does have his day . . . sort of.

  * * *

  The brass-blonde sitting at the table looked up as the muscular young man entered Gavagan’s. “Hello, Mr. Jeffers,” she said.

  The muscular young man said: “Hello, Mrs. Jonas. A brew please, Mr. Cohan.” He turned his head and spoke over his shoulder from his place at the bar: “Waiting for the Professor?”

  “That’s right. He’s probably forgotten that he made a date with me and is back in the book stacks at the college library, with half a dozen books spread on the floor around him, chasing references. The way that man behaves!”

  Mr. Cohan combed the excess head off the top of Jeffers’ beer with a celluloid stick and slid the glass across the counter. The door of the ladies’ room opened behind him. From it emerged a massive female of approximately forty-five, both as to age and waistline, with a floppy hat and a gold pince-nez perched in the center of a somewhat belligerent countenance. In one hand she held a suitcase; in the other a lower, fatter bag, with a tarpaulin cover. The woman sat down at the table next to Mrs. Jonas and spoke: “Some Tokay, please. I will see the bottle.”

  Mr. Cohan came around the bar and set a glass in front of her, and exhibited the bottle, at which she peered after adjusting her pince-nez. “Six puttonos; that is good. You shall pour.”

  As Mr. Cohan extracted the cork with a pop, the Amazon turned to Mrs. Jonas. “Troubles with a man you may have,” she said, “but anybody that says mine are not worse is an ignoramus.”

  “Sssh,” said Mrs. Jonas. “You’ll frighten Mr. Jeffers off women for life, and he’s one of the few eligible bachelors around. I’m keeping him for my second string.”

  “Oh, I don’t know—” began Mr. Jeffers. The large woman swung toward Mr. Cohan with the ponderousness of a drawbridge. “You shall tell her how much trouble I have with my man, my Putzi,” she said, firmly.

  Mr. Cohan’s face took on a firmness equal to her own. “Now look here, Mrs. Vacarescu,” he said, “this is a free country and if you want to talk about your own troubles, I cannot prevent you. But I will not talk about such things in Gavagan’s, by God, because in the first place it’s bad for business; and in the second. Father McConaghy will be making me do penance. And I’m warning you that your man can come in here and drink his beer like anyone else, but dogs we will not have in Gavagan’s.”

  Mrs. Vacarescu did not appear to be daunted. “I will pay for a bottle of Tokay for him also,” she said, drinking heartily. “But it is most strongly important that he does not go out from here while it is still dark. And I know it is here he will come, like always on nights when the Sängerbund is not meeting.”

  Mr. Jeffers said: “I don’t understand all this, but why shouldn’t your husband go out of Gavagan’s while it’s dark? He can’t very well stay all night, can he?”

  Mrs. Vacarescu favored him with a glance of soul-searing scorn, “Because he is mine Putzi, and this time he is not to spoil my vacation, like always. By night he goes out of here, he is running around with some bitch—”

  Mrs. Jonas gave a little gasp; Mr. Jeffers cleared his throat.

  “—And next morning I got trouble with him again.” Mrs. Vacarescu took another drink of Tokay and looked at her hearers. Mr. Cohan came round the end of the bar with the second bottle of Tokay and set it down beside her. “That will be four dollars and twenty cents,” he said.

  Mrs. Vacarescu snapped open her purse. “You will also give something to this so-beautiful lady,” she said.

  “I don’t think—” began Mrs. Jonas, in a rather chilly voice.

  “Ach, you are thinking I am not a lady,” said Mrs. Vacarescu, “because of what I say, not so? But mine friend Mr. Cohan, he will tell you, it is true, and I am not making just bad words.”

  “We got a good class of trade in Gavagan’s,” said Mr. Cohan.

  Mrs. Jonas said: “I don’t believe I quite understand.”

  Mrs. Vacarescu produced a handkerchief smelling powerfully of patchouli, with which she dabbed at one eye, then the other.

  It is mine Putzi [she said]. I will tell you so you understand. Never was such a man as Putzi when I knew him the first time in Budapest; strong and handsome and tall like a tree. We have picnics together on the island by Budapest on Sunday in summer, and we are eating radishes and drinking lager beer, and he is telling me stories and we are picking flowers. He would promise me everything, even a castle in Transylvania, where he comes from, and my mother says he is a good young man and I should marry him. But he will not be married by a priest; he has to have the Amtmann for it, like the peace justice here. My mother does not like that, she says a wedding by the Amtmann is a no-good, and if Putzi will not marry me by the priest, I should not marry him at all.

  But it is love. [Mrs. Vacarescu sighed, pressed one hand to an ample bosom, and drank again.] So one day I run away with Putzi and we get married by the Amtmann, like he says. At first everything is fine, only we are not having picnics no more, because he says he has to concentrate on Sunday afternoons. But all he does is drink beer and look out of the window. And at night he is so funny, always walking back and forth in the room, and I cannot get him to go over to my mother’s house for a piece of strudel and a cup of coffee.

  And that is only the beginning. You know how it is, lady [she gestured to Mrs. Jonas]; those men will promise you everything till they get what they want, and then where are you? It gets to be like that with Putzi. When I ask where is my castle in Transylvania, he takes me by the arm and shoves me into the kitchen and says that is my castle. You got no idea of the things that man does. He don’t like the sausages we have for dinner, bang on the floor goes the sausages. He don’t like some of my friends that come in for a piece of strudel at night, he says, “Get those dopes out of here before they eat up all the money I make!” Right in front of them, too. When I tell him they are my friends and it is none of his business, he puts on his hat and goes right out the door and that is the last I see of him all night.

  In the morning he comes in as sweet like Christmas cake, and he can’t do enough for me, so I know something is wrong, like it always is when your man tries to make up to you more than he has to. So I think maybe he is chasing some woman, and the next time some of my friends are there and he walks out like that and stays all night, I start asking people, have they seen what Putzi is up to. The most I can find out is that he goes to Kettler’s Bierstube and drinks beer there half the night and then he goes away again. And every time in the morning he is still half-drunk but trying to make up to me like anything.

  He does this once a week for a couple of months till I cannot stand it. So one night I think I will lock the door on him and let the loafer, the bum, stay outside when he gets back.

  I went out to lock the door, but when I get by the hall out, here is a dachshund. It is fat and a good dog. Also, even if I have not seen this dachshund before, I can see it likes me, because it climbs up on its hind legs
, so, and tries to lick my hand, and when I try to put it out again, it only comes back.

  So I said, what can I do if it wants to be my dachshund. Maybe it will be better company than Putzi. I found me an old piece of rug for it to sleep on, and gave it some water to drink and a piece of the pig’s knuckles that was left over from dinner, and then I went back and locked the door.

  But when I wake up in the morning, there is that drunken ninnyhammer of a husband of mine right in the bed, snoring like he was running a steam-engine. This I could not understand because the door is not the kind that just locks, but it has a bolt, and the windows we always close, because the night air is so unhealthy. My mother knew a woman that died of it once, in Szeged.

  And when I get out in the kitchen, there is no dachshund. The only thing I can think of is that when my man came home, he kicked it out, so I asked the big lummox about it when he got up. I should have known better, maybe, because Putzi is like that in the morning, he could bite the head off a horse unless he wants to start talking himself. Anyway, all he said to me was I should shut my big mouth.

  I don’t care who it is, they can’t talk to me like that. [Mrs. Vacarescu emitted an audible hiccup and drowned it in more Tokay.] So I told him to shut his goddam trap himself because I’m a lady. Then we had an argument that lasted all day, and Putzi slams the door and says he won’t come back till he pleases. Not till he had his supper, though—hah! You can bet he gets his belly full first.

  So I sat down with my sewing, and I said to myself, I’ll fix him this time, and when it got real late, I went around to lock all the windows real good and bolt the door, only when I got out in front, here was this dachshund again. Only this time it had another dachshund with it and anyone can see the other dachshund is a bitch. My dachshund tried to bring the other one in with it, but the other one wouldn’t come, so I took it in like before and gave it something to eat, and would you believe it? In the morning there was Putzi again and the dachshund was gone.