“Why?” asked Keithette pitilessly. She was a rosy, broad-faced woman, stocky and flat-chested (the standard female form these days); but at such moments her mouth looked as thin as a fissure in glass. “Why? Please tell me, Tom.”
Tom laid aside his pestle and made a two-handed gesture of shaping. “Perhaps because it shows—it shows the essential oneness of your nature.”
This was a bit much for Keithette. “What oneness?” she said, and folded her arms tightly. “Go on. What oneness?”
And now Tom, too, was stumped. “I don’t really know,” he said. “But I’m sure that ribbon looks very nice with the dress.”
Keithette may have been about to soften. We shall never know. At that moment, just as Andromeda watchfully raised the wooden spoon to her lips—they heard a distinct little bark from beyond the kitchen door.… The three figures reared and stiffened. Time went on for a while with nothing happening inside it, and the moment might well have passed intact if there hadn’t come a second yelp, more emboldened and demanding than the first. Andromeda’s alarm was acute. She made to speak but was quickly checked by an unpierceable glare from her mother. Then came the third yelp.
“Shatterday,” said Keithette.
But now she rose up, seeming to swell and take fire with the woman’s need to confront the worst. Keithette strode to the passage door, Andromeda and Tom a couple of feet behind her. She turned, resolute and incensed, before she seized the handle. The door opened like a lid.
And what should they see but the little puppy, quite recovered, full of beans in fact, only briefly startled and now skipping and twisting, feinting this way and that, and wagging his tail with such violence that his entire rear end was just a furry little blur. Then he swooned onto his back with his cocked paws aloft. Andromeda burst out crying and pushed herself through to kneel at the little puppy’s side.
“What’s that?” said Keithette.
“Leave him alone,” said Andromeda. “He’s a little—‘puppy,’ ” she explained, with a new effort showing in her eyes. “A little puppy.”
Adorably the little puppy gazed upward.
“My little puppy,” said Andromeda.
“Why do I put up with her?” Keithette began. “Answer me, Tom. Please answer me. Where did it come from? Right from the start she never gave me a moment’s peace. Why can’t she be like any other little girl? Why? Why? That’s right. I’ll pack you off to live with the children. Or the Queers! Where did you find it? Now you listen to me, Andromeda. Andromeda, indeed. Her own name’s not good enough for her. She has to go and call herself Andromeda! What’s it doing now? Well, I’ll tell you one thing, young lady. It’s not staying here.”
It took many hours of supplication, many Blametakes and Faultfinds, and much work for Tom on the mat, over the tub, and in the sack, great play being made with the hot towels and cold compresses, the back scratchers and skin loofahs, not to mention all the hair stroking, neck nuzzling, and breast kissing—plus the tireless and tearful pleas of tiny Andromeda—but in the end Keithette was pretty well won over to the little puppy’s presence, a presence that was understood to be temporary, contingent, multiprovisoed. Naturally, the ruling could be reversed at a single snap of Keithette’s brawny red fingers. Ah, but what could you do when it came to a little puppy like this one, with his ridiculous frown and his beseeching eyes? All the little puppy had going for him, really, was his adorability. And he was adorable—yes he was. After the countless promises and penances, the clauses and covenants of the long afternoon, Keithette herself seemed quite exhausted by the fray.
“All right,” she said. “It can live here for a while.”
“He,” said Andromeda.
“Where is it anyway?”
Where was the little puppy? Snuggling at Keithette’s feet, of course, and blinking up at her gratefully. By nightfall the little puppy was ensconced on Keithette’s lap. It was all Andromeda could do to prize him free for a cuddle. Tom looked on from his leisurebench with hard-won relief. He monitored Keithette for signs of sudden mood swing or theme change. Everything seemed all right for now. But it had been some Shatterday.
Oiled, groomed, distinctly plump, and impeccably toilet trained, the little puppy was nowadays to be found, more often than not, on his favorite perch: the window ledge in Andromeda’s little bedroom. Through the mists of the half curtain, his tail wagging uncertainly, then quickening in sudden bursts of recognition or general enthusiasm, the little puppy watched the people come and go, for hours on end. Because the people—the people were so beautiful! The women striding about with their hands on their hips, occasionally pausing to talk and nod among themselves, arms folded. The girls, regal and remote, with expensive self-awareness in oval cheeks and artful hair. All colors and sizes the people were. Yes, and the old, too, with their more careful tread (easy does it), and the way light seemed to pour from their human eyes. The little boys were stern and watchful, shut-faced, on their guard. Why weren’t they playing? wondered the little puppy, in his way. Why weren’t they playing—bounding and tumbling like packs of puppies?
No one played except the little puppy. But the little puppy played a lot. The jumping games, the rolling games, the hiding games. He very nearly exasperated his young mistress with these endless larks and sprees of his. One quiet Shunday she found the little puppy frenziedly prying at a round red bauble fixed (by Tom) to the foot of her bed. Encouraged by his barking she managed to free the thing from its clasp; she then rolled it into the little puppy’s path. A ball, a red ball! The little puppy proceeded to chase it around the room. And he chased it around the room. And he chased it around the room again. Holding the ball in his jaws, he challenged Andromeda to shake it free and then throw it for him. Then he retrieved it and bounced around her until she threw it again. Really, the hysteria of the little puppy at such moments. Andromeda didn’t understand. But the little puppy clearly needed his play, as badly as he needed his love and his food. Now, when she brought him his vegetables and fruit, the little puppy often thrust his whole head into the bowl.
Some passing people stared in once, and saw the little puppy on his perch. He yelped at them playfully, and tensed, hair-triggering himself for a romp. The people recoiled in hostile amazement. A small crowd gathered, and after a while, even though the little puppy had by now hidden himself under the bed, there came a stubborn thumping on the back door. This shuffling posse was confronted by Keithette—who settled their hash with a fearful blast. Andromeda was then called into the parlor to join Keithette and Tom in a three-hour discussion. The subject: Keithette’s imagination. At this point, however, Andromeda resolved to act boldly.
With Tom’s help and collusion, she fashioned a little collar for the little puppy—and a little leash. And out she walked into the village with him. Twisting and writhing and half-throttling himself at first, the little puppy soon fell into an obedient trot, only the head busy and indocile, bolting all shapes and colors as if the whole world might be food. It must be said that the experiment was not an obvious success. Many people jeered, or backed away, or burst into tears, and the little puppy himself gave a whine from some sluice in his sinuses, a whine of dismay at the unhappiness he somehow seemed to represent and personify. Andromeda walked on in full obstinacy and pride, the little puppy rather cowering now at her ankles. On their return—she could still hear the hecklers in her wake—Andromeda was greeted by Keithette who surprised everyone, including herself, by giving her daughter a smile of approval and by openly ruffling the shiny folds of the little puppy’s neck. Andromeda adorned his collar with silver bells and took him out again the next day too. She had made up her mind. But the little puppy, it ought to be said, was a good deal daunted.
“I’ve got a name for you,” Andromeda whispered in the dark. “Jackajack. Do you like it?” The little puppy was in bed with Andromeda. He liked it. He liked everything. “If you weren’t an animal,” she whispered, “I would call you John and you would be my boy.” The little puppy g
azed up at her, his eyes lit by an unbounded willingness.
Why do people love children? Why do children love babies? Why do we all love animals? What do animals love, that way? Everything, the whole world, more, even the stars up there—stars like the star called Andromeda, fixed in the scattered heavens, burning bright.
You couldn’t really blame the villagers. They were all having a very bad time, and they weren’t equipped for bad times. Whereas, in days gone by, the people would go about their tasks with tears of contentment in their eyes, now they wept the other tears. And where were they to turn? Down the soft decades they had lost the old get-up and go—the know-how, the make-do. Predation and all its paraphernalia had quite petered out of their gene cams and pulse codes. Given a generation or two, and given their new knack or curse of sudden and active adaptation, oh, I suppose they might have come up with something, in time. But there wasn’t time.
They looked for authority, and what did they find? The natural leaders were, of course, the women with the loudest voices and the strongest personalities; and if you think Keithette is redoubtable enough, you should check out divorine—or Kevinia! At first they tried to hate the dog away. They sat around hating it and hating it, but still the dog lumbered in for his weekly debauch. They tried to cry the dog away, and that didn’t work either. They tried ignoring it; but being ignored didn’t make much odds to a dog like this dog. So there were more consultations. They didn’t hold a meeting: it was simply a matter of a few dozen exhausted and terrified husbands—all the Toms and Tims and Tams—sprinting with messages from hut to hut. Incidentally, no one had ever decided any of this. It wasn’t a reaction to the deep past. You see, there was no deep memory. This was just the way the world was now.
And so they asked death in through the back door, and let him feast on the malevolved, the beakmen and wing-women, the furred or shelled or slippery beings with their expressions of stunned disgrace. It was subliminally decided that everything was all their fault. Ah, the poor Queers.… One Fireday, Andromeda took the little puppy that could to the place where the malevolved often hung out; he was tolerantly greeted, and even made much of by some old hinny or heteroclite, who cosseted the puppy’s coat with a limp flippered hand. The little puppy took to the Queers, as indeed he took to everyone. They were defeatist, lackadaisical, and inert: faulty survival machines, they knew they weren’t made to last. They knew they probably wouldn’t be selected, not in the end, not in that sense. And how few of them there were now. Soon, thought Andromeda, the poor Queers will be all used up. Then what? Only one outcome. She considered ways of perhaps saving the little puppy, if it came to that.
On the way home they were followed for a while by a group of women who shrieked and chanted at the little puppy, and made unpleasant faces, cowing him rather badly. “Come on, Jackajack,” said Andromeda loudly. “Never mind them.” So he jinked along beside her, glancing back uneasily over his dropped shoulders. But Andromeda did not glance back. She walked straight and true, filling her given space. For Andromeda enjoyed an ambiguous prestige in the village; she certainly had rarity value. It was partly to do with such things as her refusal to go and live in the child pool, and the fact that she had changed her own name. She had changed it from Briana—to Andromeda, if you please. But it was really all about beauty: beauty. Nobody knew what people were supposed to look like anymore or could guess at the human forms they once had graced. The women all rugged and ruddy and right; the men all drab, effaced, annulled. And yet everyone has time for beauty, for art, for pattern and plan. We all come around to beauty in the end. As instinctively as the dog salivated with pleasure on encountering human remains in some patch of his own chaotic excretions (his heart soared like a hawk), so the people gazed at little Andromeda’s round-eyed face, her dark clefts and latencies, and felt pride in the human molding.
“Look, Jackajack,” she said. They had come to the edge of the crater, the core, the deep dish and its great query of fire. Now the flames ate the air, spitting and chewing and clearing their throats. No one fed the fire yet it burned anyway, with no fuel—but with fission, perhaps; perhaps fission’s daughters lay trapped beneath the crust. Although the village was godless, the crater was agreed to be at least semisacred, and the people felt its codes, sensed its secrets with reluctant awe. Certainly no one went down there just for the hell of it. And now of course it served a different function. “Look, Jackajack,” whispered Andromeda. Down in the contoured chasm, ringed by fire, some women were tethering an old Queer to the stake, ready for Shatterday. The little puppy barked. He didn’t like fire. Nor did the dog. But the dog didn’t mind fire that much. He could put up with it, if he had to.
Keithette sat heftily at the round table, micromonitored by Tom and Andromeda. Both had been present at the informal, morning-long seminar that Keithette had convened. The subject: Keithette’s sensibility. The really warm work of the afternoon, though, had fallen on Tom alone—a tight regime of scalp kneading, hair braiding, intertoe loofahing, and hourly sexual intercourse. It hadn’t worked. Nothing worked now. Because tonight was a night of the dog. And now it seemed that every day was Shatterday.
True to Andromeda’s prediction, the inevitable came to pass and soon the supply of Queers was pretty much exhausted. Actually they were picked off a lot quicker than anybody bargained for, because even the dog turned his nose up at some of them. He killed them all right, with one swipe of his bleeding claws, and gave the corpses a frightful worrying; but he wouldn’t eat them. He just stood there, stupid and implacable, for hour after hour (he stayed upright at all times, even during his egregious naps), before tearing off the dead Queer’s best limb and trudging away with it—to return the next night, and the next. Now he would peer down into the lit crater and see no offering for him there. Just the crackling fire, no louder or brighter than the fire of hunger in his heart.
“Here he comes,” said Keithette.
Yes, here he comes. You could hear him liquidly snorting and yodeling as he loped toward them over the fields, nearer, ever nearer. The whole village listened—listened in darkness to a world of sound. His creaking gait, his grunts, his great gurglings at the prospect of messy satiation. Next, his long silence at the brink of the crater, his thwarted howl of disappointment, his final scream of ravenous rage. Then the sniffings and rootlings round the huts, the latherings and flappy droolings, the regular flinging of his bulk against any weakness, the splitting of wood, the human cries, the heavy arhythmical bounding of the chase, the incensed rip-pings and gulpings of the kill.… Once, as the dog was fizzily consuming his prey, the little puppy (held fast on Andromeda’s lap) gave out a piercing yelp. Outside there was sudden silence—followed, several minutes later, by a growl of fabulous greed and hatred, inches from the front door. But the dog’s hunger had lost its rawness (and there’d be another night), and all they heard then were the usual sounds of grumbling haulage as the dog dragged the half-eaten carcass out of the village and into the hills.
“He’s going now,” said Keithette. She closed her eyes and wiggled a finger at Tom, who moved grimly toward her. “When will the dog stop coming? When? When? Why don’t I know what to do? Why? Why? Tomorrow I’ll speak to Royene, and to Clivonne. I might even speak to Kevinia. I don’t know why, but I think I’ll be the last to go. Not there,” she told Tom. “There. There.”
When the danger of predation is great, communities of whatever phylum tend to interknit more closely, and hierarchical roles become sharper and more keenly contested. Or at any rate that’s the idea. This particular community, for instance, had long lost all genetic heft. Probably their best bet would have been to move out and go nomad for a while. But site-tenacity was, alas, pretty well the only stable element in the local DNA transcription. How could you run when, in your head, this was the only place?
With a square meal inside him, and a decent cadaver to nibble and gnaw on, the dog would be gone for seven nights. This seemed a clear gain, after the post-Queer chaos, and in fact
everyone was secretly impressed by the dog’s asceticism in restricting himself to one human per week. It would take him at least a couple of years to account for them all. That Shunday, however, brought unpleasant surprises.
On his last sortie the dog had forced his way into the spare-husband compound and selected his victim from the fifteen men who huddled there. In the skirmish three spare husbands had been wounded or nicked by the dog’s teeth and claws. By Moanday afternoon they had swelled outlandishly in the belly and sprouted coarse hair on their backs and buttocks. All three died during the night, in speechless horror. On Woundsday it was reported that seven spare husbands who had merely come into contact with the dog’s coat had developed cutaneous conditions of incredible virulence; they, too, passed away, in a frothing nightmare of serpigo and yaws. By Fireday the remaining four men—who had done no more than smell the dog’s breath—checked out with toxic shock.
The women’s thoughts naturally turned to the child pool, housed in a none too sturdy structure just behind the spare-husband compound. Well, I say “naturally,” but it should be stressed that things had quieted down very noticeably on the bearing-and-caring circuit, the operative genes being, if not selfless, then fairly unambitious in tendency. So were they all meant to die, quickly, without a fight? Nothing wants to evolve but everyone wants to survive. We just don’t want to go. Even when life is poor, and mostly fearful, and there are pressing reasons to quit—we don’t want to. We don’t want to go.