The Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  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.

  “Blue, who tells you what to do?”

  “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.”

  “If these dogs do not behave correctly, the masters—what to do then?”

  Another long pause. “Find another human.”

  “And this human here?”

  “Kill it.”

  I gripped the edges of my floating platform hard. My hands still trembled. “Put me outside now.”

  “No.”

  “I must stay inside.”

  “These dogs do not behave correctly.”

  “I must make these dogs behave correctly.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the masters want these dogs to display . . .” I had stopped talking to Blue. I was talking to myself, to steady myself, but even that I couldn’t manage. The words caromed around in my mind—loyalty, service, protection—but none came out of my mouth. I couldn’t do this. I was going to die. The aliens had come from God-knew-where to treat the dying Earth like a giant pet store, intrigued only by a canine domestication that had happened ten thousand years ago and by nothing else on the planet, nothing else humanity had or might accomplish. Only dogs. The masters want these dogs to display—

  Blue surprised me with a new word. “Love,” it said.

  Law #4: Notice everything. I needed to learn all I could, starting with Blue. He’d made garbage appear, and food and water and cages. What else could he do?

  “Blue, make the water go away.” And it did, just sank into the floor, which dried instantly. I was fucking Moses, commanding the Red Sea. I climbed off the platform, inched among the dog cages, and studied them individually.

  “You called the refugee camp and the dump ‘hell.’ Where did you get that word?”

  Nothing.

  “Who said ‘hell’?”

  “Humans.”

  Blue had cameras outside the Dome. Of course he did; he’d seen me find that first puppy in the garbage. Maybe Blue had been waiting for someone like me, alone and non-threatening, to come close with a dog. But it had watched before that, and it had learned the word “hell,” and maybe it had recorded the incidents in the “presentation.” I filed this information for future use.

  “This dog is dead.” The first puppy, decaying into stinking pulp. “It is killed. Non-operative.”

  “What to do now?”

  “Make the dead dog go away.”

  A long pause: thinking it over? Accessing data banks? Communicating with aliens? And what kind of moron couldn’t figure out by itself that a dead dog was never going to behave correctly? So much for artificial intelligence.

  “Yes,” Blue finally said, and the little corpse dissolved as if it had never been.

  I found one more dead dog and one close to death. Blue disappeared the first, said no to the second. Apparently we had to just let it suffer until it died. I wondered how much the idea of “death” even meant to a robot. There were twenty-three live dogs, of which I had delivered only three to the Dome.

  “Blue—did another human, before you brought me here, try to train the dogs?”

  “These dogs do not behave correctly.”

  “Yes. But did a human not me be inside? To make these dogs behave correctly?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to him or her?”

  No response.

  “What to do now with the other human?”

  “Kill it.”

  I put a hand against the wall and leaned on it. The wall felt smooth and slick, with a faint and unpleasant tingle. I removed my hand.

  All computers could count. “How many humans did you kill?”

  “Two.”

  Three’s the charm. But there were no charms. No spells, no magic wards, no cavalry coming over the hill to ride to the rescue; I’d known that ever since the War. There was just survival. And, now, dogs.

  I chose the mangy little poodle. It hadn’t bit me when the old man had surrendered it, or when I’d kept it overnight. That was at least a start. “Blue, make this dog’s cage go away.
But only this one cage!”

  The cage dissolved. The poodle stared at me distrustfully. Was I supposed to stare back, or would that get us into some kind of canine pissing contest? The thing was small but it had teeth.

  I had a sudden idea. “Blue, show me how this dog does not behave correctly.” If I could see what it wasn’t doing, that would at least be a start.

  Blue floated to within a foot of the dog’s face. The dog growled and backed away. Blue floated away and the dog quieted but it still stood in what would be a menacing stance if it weighed more than nine or ten pounds: ears raised, legs braced, neck hair bristling. Blue said, “Come.” The dog did nothing. Blue repeated the entire sequence and so did Mangy.

  I said, “You want the dog to follow you. Like the dogs in the presentation.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want the dog to come when you say ‘Come.’”

  “Love,” Blue said.

  “What is ‘love,’ Blue?”

  No response.

  The robot didn’t know. Its masters must have had some concept of “love,” but fuck-all knew what it was. And I wasn’t sure I knew anymore, either. That left Mangy, who would never “love” Blue or follow him or lick his hand because dogs operated on smell—even I knew that about them—and Blue, a machine, didn’t smell like either a person or another dog. Couldn’t the aliens who sent him here figure that out? Were they watching this whole farce, or had they just dropped a half-sentient computer under an upturned bowl on Earth and told it, “Bring us some loving dogs”? Who knew how aliens thought?

  I didn’t even know how dogs thought. There were much better people for this job—professional trainers, or that guy on TV who made tigers jump through burning hoops. But they weren’t here, and I was. I squatted on my haunches a respectful distance from Mangy and said, “Come.”

  It growled at me.

  “Blue, raise the platform this high.” I held my hand at shoulder height. The platform rose.

  “Now make some cookies on the platform.”

  Nothing.

  “Make some . . . cheese on the platform.”

  Nothing. You don’t see much cheese in a dump.

  “Make some bread on the platform.”

  Nothing. Maybe the platform wasn’t user-friendly.

  “Make some bread.”

  After a moment, loaves tumbled out of the wall. “Enough! Stop!”

  Mangy had rushed over to the bread, tearing at it, and the other dogs were going wild. I picked up one loaf, put it on the platform, and said, “Make the rest of the bread go away.”

  It all dissolved. No wonder the dogs were wary; I felt a little dizzy myself. A sentence from so long-ago child’s book rose in my mind: Things come and go so quickly here!

  I had no idea how much Blue could, or would, do on my orders. “Blue, make another room for me and this one dog. Away from the other dogs.”

  “No.”

  “Make this room bigger.”

  The room expanded evenly on all sides. “Stop.” It did. “Make only this end of the room bigger.”

  Nothing.

  “Okay, make the whole room bigger.”

  When the room stopped expanding, I had a space about forty feet square, with the dog cages huddled in the middle. After half an hour of experimenting, I got the platform moved to one corner, not far enough to escape the dog stench but better than nothing. (Law #1: Take what you can get.) I got a depression in the floor filled with warm water. I got food, drinking water, soap, and some clean cloth, and a lot of rope. By distracting Mangy with bits of bread, I got rope onto her frayed collar. After I got into the warm water and scrubbed myself, I pulled the poodle in. She bit me. But somehow I got her washed, too. Afterwards she shook herself, glared at me, and went to sleep on the hard floor. I asked Blue for a soft rug.

  He said, “The other humans did this.”

  And Blue killed them anyway.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  The big windowless room had no day, no night, no sanity. I slept and ate when I needed to, and otherwise I worked. Blue never left. He was an oversized, all-seeing eye in the corner. Big Brother, or God.

  Within a few weeks—maybe—I had Mangy trained to come when called, to sit, and to follow me on command. I did this by dispensing bits of bread and other goodies. Mangy got fatter. I didn’t care if she ended up the Fat Fiona of dogs. Her mange didn’t improve, since I couldn’t get Blue to wrap his digital mind around the concept of medicines, and even if he had I wouldn’t have known what to ask for. The sick puppy died in its cage.

  I kept the others fed and watered and flooded the shit out of their cages every day, but that was all. Mangy took all my time. She still regarded me warily, never curled up next to me, and occasionally growled. Love was not happening here.

  Nonetheless, Blue left his corner and spoke for the first time in a week, scaring the hell out of me. “This dog behaves correctly.”

  “Well, thanks. I tried to . . . no, Blue . . .”

  Blue floated to within a foot of Mangy’s face, said, “Follow,” and floated away. Mangy sat down and began to lick one paw. Blue rose and floated toward me.

  “This dog does not behave correctly.”

  I was going to die.

  “No, listen to me—listen! The dog can’t smell you! It behaves for humans because of humans’ smell! Do you understand?”

  “No. This dog does not behave correctly.”

  “Listen! How the hell can you learn anything if you don’t listen? You have to have a smell! Then the dog will follow you!”

  Blue stopped. We stood frozen, a bizarre tableau, while the robot considered. Even Mangy stopped licking her paw and watched, still. They say dogs can smell fear.

  Finally Blue said, “What is smell?”

  It isn’t possible to explain smell. Can’t be done. Instead I pulled down my pants, tore the cloth I was using as underwear from between my legs, and rubbed it all over Blue, who did not react. I hoped he wasn’t made of the same stuff as the Dome, which even spray paint had just slid off of. But, of course, he was. So I tied the strip of cloth around him with a piece of rope, my fingers trembling. “Now try the dog, Blue.”

  “Follow,” Blue said, and floated away from Mangy.

  She looked at him, then at me, then back at the floating metal sphere. I held my breath from some insane idea that I would thereby diminish my own smell. Mangy didn’t move.

  “This dog does not be—”

  “She will if I’m gone!” I said desperately. “She smells me and you . . . and we smell the same so it’s confusing her! But she’ll follow you fine if I’m gone, do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Blue . . . I’m going to get on the platform. See, I’m doing it. Raise the platform very high, Blue. Very high.”

  A moment later my head and ass both pushed against the ceiling, squishing me. I couldn’t see what was happening below. I heard Blue say, “Follow,” and I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting. My life depended on a scrofulous poodle with a gloomy disposition.

  Blue said, “This dog behaves correctly.”

  He lowered my platform to a few yards above the floor, and I swear that—eyeless as he is and with part of his sphere obscured by my underwear—he looked right at me.

  “This dog does behave correctly. This dog is ready.”

  “Ready? For . . . for what?”

  Blue didn’t answer. The next minute the floor opened and Mangy, yelping, tumbled into it. The floor closed. At the same time, one of the cages across the room dissolved and a German shepherd hurtled towards me. I shrieked and yelled, “Raise the platform!” It rose just before the monster grabbed me.

  Blue said, “What to do now? This dog does not behave correctly.”

  “For God’s sakes, Blue—”

  “This dog must love.”

  The shepherd leapt and snarled, teeth bared.

  I couldn’t talk Blue out of the shepherd, which was as feral and vicious and unrelenting as anyt
hing in a horror movie. Or as Blue himself, in his own mechanical way. So I followed the First Law: Take what you can get.

  “Blue, make garbage again. A lot of garbage, right here.” I pointed to the wall beside my platform.

  “No.”

  Garbage, like everything else, apparently was made—or released, or whatever—from the opposite wall. I resigned myself to this. “Make a lot of garbage, Blue.”

  Mountains of stinking debris cascaded from the wall, spilling over until it reached the dog cages.

  “Now stop. Move my platform above the garbage.”

  The platform moved. The caged dogs howled. Uncaged, the shepherd poked eagerly in the refuse, too distracted to pay much attention to me. I had Blue lower the platform and I poked among it, too, keeping one eye on Vicious. If Blue was creating the garbage and not just trucking it in, he was doing a damn fine job of duplication. Xerox should have made such good copies.

  I got smeared with shit and rot, but I found what I was looking for. The box was nearly a quarter full. I stuffed bread into it, coated the bread thoroughly, and discarded the box back onto the pile.

  “Blue, make the garbage go away.”

  It did. Vicious glared at me and snarled. “Nice doggie,” I said, “have some bread.” I threw pieces and Vicious gobbled them.

  Listening to the results was terrible. Not, however, as terrible as having Vicious tear me apart or Blue vaporize me. The rat poison took all “night” to kill the dog, which thrashed and howled. Throughout, Blue stayed silent. He had picked up some words from me, but he apparently didn’t have enough brain power to connect what I’d done with Vicious’s death. Or maybe he just didn’t have enough experience with humans. What does a machine know about survival?

  “This dog is dead,” Blue said in the “morning.”

  “Yes. Make it go away.” And then, before Blue could get there first, I jumped off my platform and pointed to a cage. “This dog will behave correctly next.”

  “No.”

  “Why not this dog?”

  “Not big.”