Dog Tales

by Jack Dann

  They were saying it all through the dome, no doubt, especially since Allen had failed to return. They wouldn’t say it to his face, or course. Even the man or men he called before this desk and told they were the next to go, wouldn’t say it to him.

  But he would see it in their eyes.

  He picked up the file again. Bennett, Andrews, Olson. There were others, but there was no use in going on.

  Ken Fowler knew that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t face them, couldn’t send more men out to die.

  He leaned forward and flipped up the toggle on the intercommunicator.

  “Yes, Mr. Fowler.”

  “Miss Stanley, please.”

  He waited for Miss Stanley, listening to Towser chewing half-heartedly on the bone. Towser’s teeth were getting bad.

  “Miss Stanley,” said Miss Stanley’s voice.

  “Just wanted to tell you. Miss Stanley, to get ready for two more.”

  “Aren’t you afraid,” asked Miss Stanley, “that you’ll run out of them? Sending out one at a time, they’d last longer, give you twice the satisfaction.”

  “One of them,” said Fowler, “will be a dog.”

  “A dog!”

  “Yes, Towser.”

  He heard the quick, cold rage that iced her voice. “Your own dog! He’s been with you all these years—”

  “That’s the point,” said Fowler. “Towser would be unhappy if I left him behind.”

  ###

  It was not the Jupiter he had known through the televisor. He had expected it to be different, but not like this. He had expected a hell of ammonia rain and stinking fumes and the deafening, thundering tumult of the storm. He had expected swirling clouds and fog and the snarling flicker of monstrous thunderbolts.

  He had not expected the lashing downpour would be reduced to drifting purple mist that moved like fleeing shadows over a red and purple sward. He had not even guessed the snaking bolts of lightning would be flares of pure ecstasy across a painted sky.

  Waiting for Towser, Fowler flexed the muscles of his body, amazed at the smooth, sleek strength he found. Not a bad body, he decided, and grimaced at remembering how he had pitied the Lopers when he glimpsed them through the television screen.

  For it had been hard to imagine a living organism based upon ammonia and hydrogen rather than upon water and oxygen, hard to believe that such a form of life could know the same quick thrill of life that humankind could know. Hard to conceive of life out in the soupy maelstrom that was Jupiter, not knowing, of course, that through Jovian eyes it was no soupy maelstrom at all.

  The wind brushed against him with what seemed gentle fingers and he remembered with a start that by Earth standards the wind was a roaring gale, a two-hundred-mile-an-hour howler laden with deadly gases.

  Pleasant scents seeped into his body. And yet scarcely scents, for it was not the sense of smell as he remembered it. It was as if his whole being was soaking up the sensation of lavender—and yet not lavender. It was something, he knew, for which he had no word, undoubtedly the first of many enigmas in terminology. For the words he knew, the thought symbols that served him as an Earthman, would not serve him as a Jovian.

  The lock in the side of the dome opened and Towser came tumbling out—at least he thought it must be Towser.

  He started to call to the dog, his mind shaping the words he meant to say. But he couldn’t say them. There was no way to say them. He had nothing to say them with.

  For a moment his mind swirled in muddy terror, a blind fear that eddied in little puffs of panic through his brain.

  How did Jovians talk? How—

  Suddenly he was aware of Towser, intensely aware of the bumbling, eager friendliness of the shaggy animal that had followed him from Earth to many planets. As if the thing that was Towser had reached out and for a moment sat within his brain.

  And out of the bubbling welcome that he sensed, came words.

  “Hiya, pal.”

  Not words really, better than words. Thought symbols in his brain, communicated thought symbols that had shades of meaning words could never have.

  “Hiya, Towser,” he said.

  “I feel good,” said Towser. “Like I was a pup. Lately I’ve been feeling pretty punk. Legs stiffening up on me and teeth wearing down to almost nothing. Hard to mumble a bone with teeth like that. Besides, the fleas give me hell. Used to be I never paid much attention to them. A couple of fleas more or less never meant much in my early days.”

  “But . . . but—” Fowler’s thoughts tumbled awkwardly. “You’re talking to me!”

  “Sure thing,” said Towser. “I always talked to you, but you couldn’t hear me. I tried to say things to you, but I couldn’t make the grade.”

  “I understood you sometimes,” Fowler said.

  “Not very well,” said Towser. “You knew when I wanted food and when I wanted a drink and when I wanted out, but that’s about all you ever managed.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fowler said.

  “Forget it,” Towser told him. “I’ll race you to the cliff.”

  For the first time, Fowler saw the cliff, apparently many miles away, but with a strange crystalline beauty that sparkled in the shadow of the many-colored clouds.

  Fowler hesitated. “It’s a long way—”

  “Ah, come on,” said Towser and even as he said it he started for the cliff.

  ###

  Fowler followed, testing his legs, testing the strength in that new body of his, a bit doubtful at first, amazed a moment later, then running with a sheer joyousness that was one with the red and purple sward, with the drifting smoke of the rain across the land.

  As he ran the consciousness of music came to him, a music that beat into his body, that surged throughout his being, that lifted him on wings of silver speed. Music like bells might make from some steeple on a sunny, springtime hill.

  As the cliff drew nearer the music deepened and filled the universe with a spray of magic sound. And he knew the music came from the tumbling waterfall that feathered down the face of the shining cliff.

  Only, he knew, it was no waterfall, but an ammoniafall and the cliff was white because it was oxygen, solidified.

  He skidded to a stop beside Towser where the waterfall broke into a glittering rainbow of many hundred colors. Literally many hundred, for here, he saw, was no shading of one primary to another as human beings saw, but a clear-cut selectivity that broke the prism down to its last ultimate classification.

  “The music,” said Towser.

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “The music,” said Towser, “is vibrations. Vibrations of water falling.”

  “But Towser, you don’t know about vibrations.”

  “Yes, I do,” contended Towser. “It just popped into my head.”

  Fowler gulped mentally. “Just popped!”

  And suddenly, within his own head, he held a formula—the formula for a process that would make metal to withstand the pressure of Jupiter.

  He stared, astounded, at the waterfall and swiftly his mind took the many colors and placed them in their exact sequence in the spectrum. Just like that. Just out of blue sky. Out of nothing, for he knew nothing either of metals or of colors.

  “Towser,” he cried. “Towser, something’s happening to us!”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Towser.

  “It’s our brains,” said Fowler. “We’re using them, all of them, down to the last hidden corner. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earththings naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way.”

  And, in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would not only be the matter of colors in a waterfall, or metals that would resist the pressure of Jupiter. He sensed other things, things not quite clear. A vague whispering that hinted of greater things, of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human i
magination. Mysteries, fact, logic built on reasoning. Things that any brain should know if it used all its reasoning power.

  “We’re still mostly Earth,” he said. “We’re just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know—a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.”

  He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.

  Back there were men who couldn’t see the beauty that was Jupiter. Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the planet’s face. Unseeing human eyes. Poor eyes. Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storm. Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.

  Men who walked alone, in terrible loneliness, talking with their tongue like Boy Scouts wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another’s mind as he could reach out and touch Towser’s mind. Shut off forever from that personal, intimate contact with other living things.

  He, Fowler, had expected terror inspired by alien things out here on the surface, had expected to cower before the threat of unknown things, had steeled himself against disgust of a situation that was not of Earth. But instead he had found something greater than Man had ever known. A swifter, surer body. A sense of exhilaration, a deeper sense of life. A sharper mind. A world of beauty that even the dreamers of the Earth had not yet imagined.

  “Let’s get going,” Towser urged.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere,” said Towser. “Just start going and see where we end up. I have a feeling . . . well, a feeling—”

  “Yes, I know,” said Fowler.

  For he had the feeling, too. The feeling of high destiny. A certain sense of greatness. A knowledge that somewhere off beyond the horizons lay adventure and things greater than adventure.

  Those other five had felt it, too. Had felt the urge to go and see, the compelling sense that here lay a life of fullness and of knowledge.

  That, he knew, was why they had not returned.

  “I won’t go back,” said Towser.

  “We can’t let them down,” said Fowler.

  Fowler took a step or two, back toward the dome, then stopped.

  Back to the dome. Back to that aching, poison-laden body he had left. It hadn’t seemed aching before, but now he knew it was.

  Back to the fuzzy brain. Back to muddled thinking. Back to the flapping mouths that formed signals others understood. Back to eyes that now would be worse than no sight at all. Back to squalor, back to crawling, back to ignorance.

  “Perhaps someday,” he said, muttering to himself.

  “We got a lot to do and a lot to see,” said Towser. “We got a lot to learn. We’ll find things—”

  Yes, they could find things. Civilizations, perhaps. Civilizations that would make the civilization of Man seem puny by comparison. Beauty and, more important, an understanding of that beauty. And a comradeship no one had ever known before—that no man, no dog had ever known before.

  And life. The quickness of life after what seemed a drugged existence.

  “I can’t go back,” said Towser.

  “Nor I,” said Fowler.

  “They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser.

  “And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.”

  I Lost My Love to the Space Shuttle Columbia

  by Damien Broderick

  Here’s an odd little tale of star-crossed love from Australian writer Damien Broderick, author of The Dreaming Dragons . . . a tale of woe that, ah, shouldn’t happen to a dog . . .

  * * *

  “Jane, you simply cannot marry a dog. The idea is ridiculous.”

  I continued to unfold my trousseau, putting the linen neatly to one side and the silk undies to the other. With determined patience I said, “I will brook no obstacle in this matter. I shall not be opposed.”

  My mother wrung her hands, staring into the afternoon’s gold glow, framed against the handsome proportions of the bedroom window. “You always were a dreadfully willful child, Boojum.”

  “Boring, Mother. Boring. Really.” Some of the linen was from my father’s new or current wife or spouse; we had not yet, in fact, established my step-parent’s gender, due to the postal strike.

  “It’s all very well for you to take that attitude, my girl. But the fact remains that it is we who must live with the neighbours.”

  I began to grow angry. “Damn the neighbours, Mother. If I cared what the Fosters deemed proper I should still be wearing a veil.”

  “You are being hysterical, dear,” Mother told me in an etiolated tone. “You know as well as I that you have never worn a veil in your life.”

  “A figure of speech.” She can be perfectly exasperating.

  “Nor a yashmak,” she said, ploughing on heedless of my raised eyes and muttered imprecations, determined to have her say, “nor a garden hat. And I cannot imagine that this terrier gentleman—”

  “Kelpie, Mother. Do try.”

  “—this kelpie fellow is without a degree of social sensitivity of his own. Don’t deny it; I know you, my girl, we might differ on some things but I trust your instincts to that extent. This dog of yours will feel uncomfortable in our circles. He will find himself expressing an interest in Mr. Percy’s peahens only to be misunderstood, and how will you feel about that contretemps?”

  Glacially I told her, “It is our intention to emigrate to Australia.”

  Mother uttered a ferocious bray. “I see. He’s found an opening on a sheep station, then?”

  “That’s not even remotely funny.” I closed the lid of the heavy carved Chinese glory box, and crossed the room to the mirror. My hair had lost some of its gloss. I found part of a dry leaf tucked in near my ear and quickly crushed it between my thumb and index finger, crumbling it, letting the fragments sift to the carpet. Try as one might, running through the park is a dusty business in late October. “There is scarcely any call on a sheep station for a theoretical nuclear physicist.”

  “God forbid that I should belittle his mathematical skills. In regard to this grotesque proposal, Jane, it’s clear enough to me that Bowser has calculated to a nicety—”

  Seething, I let my brush fall to the floor and turned on her, cheeks so flushed I could feel their heat. “His name is Spot, Mother, as you know. I will not have—” My breast heaved; all the words whirled in my brain. “As you know because we have conducted this tedious argument sufficiently often and with such a plethora of redundancy that I am heartily sick of it.” I looked around blindly for the brush, took up a silver-backed comb instead. Mother held her tongue but I was not appeased. I watched her reflection. “Bitch,” I muttered.

  She gave a satirical snort, and left the room. I could have kicked myself.

  I was not totally without sympathy for her qualms, though I’d have died before admitting so. On the other hand I judged her objections fundamentally reactionary. In this age of moon-shots and dime-store hand calculators, it seemed to me not merely ignoble but rather trite to find some course of action offensive simply because it was not hallowed by family tradition.

  The fact is, Spot is the brightest dog I have ever met. He entered college under a special program, endowed by the Chomsky Institution, and was a wild fellow, mad for poetry and drinking all night and the theatre. He swiftly discerned that culture as such is problematical, overdetermined, quixotic, that its appeal is essentially to the intellectually lightweight. He dabbled in painting for a time, creating a small stir with his innovative brush stroke. But it was the endless wonder of science which spoke to his heart of hearts, and led to his specializing first in chemistry and finally in the application of Sophus Lie’s groups to that previously intractable poser, the ‘per
iodic table’ of elementary particles and their resonances. Much of his work was awfully abstruse and beyond my modest attainments, yet Spot retained a sense of primal joy in his assault on the universe. One might come out into the yard with a bone from the table (for he was then living at our house under an exchange arrangement) and find him gazing raptly at the moon, his lips parted, inflamed with an innocent intoxication so much purer than his raunchy nights backstage with the Royal Shakespearean Company. I was struck then, fondly, by his ardent, wistful expressions, like Carl Sagan’s. Any comparison I might make, however, is bound to be misleading. I’d never met anyone, man or woman, who affected me so piercingly. Before I knew it, I was head over heels in love with a dog, and I am prepared to confess that at first I was just as astonished and taken aback by this discovery as was my dear bitter mother a few months later when Spot went in to announce our intentions.

  I suspect that what brought Mother around in the end was the flamboyant song and dance my father laid on when the word reached him in Hollywood, or wherever the banal location was where he was shooting his latest depredation. My desire to marry he found innately disagreeable, as who would not who had entered that singular state fourteen times, yet Randy discerned a redemptive quality in my choice of spouse.

  “Just so long as it’s not one of those godawful boys next door, sweetie,” he told me when the company finally had the telephone lines operating in the correct manner.

  “He’s nice,” I said in the high light voice with a giggle at the corners of it that I use with Randy when I want something out of him. “You’ll like him. Tee hee.”

  “Ah, your laugh’s a tonic, Jinny.” He paused and became very serious. “Just assure me on one score, sweetie. I can appreciate his interest in quantum mechanics, but I must be certain . . . he doesn’t bite, does he?”

  Strange question, from the father you love. Dote on. When you’re trying to con him. (His wife was in fact, it had eventuated, a woman, though only just. Had the rules of entry been a hair more stringent she might easily have graced the hippo category. Still.) After all, it wasn’t as if Spot had rabies. I decided to treat the matter as rather a course attempt by Papa to protect his pocketbook while pretending at levity: i.e., that by ‘bite’ he was employing the demotic locution for ‘seek undue financial advantage through abuse of personal connections.’