“That’s Bernie. How come I’m on the right side of the nonexistent law again?” Goddamn if m’own drink hadn’t evaporated somehow alluva sudden. I dialed another justa wash breakfast—steak an’ eggs, hashbrowns, English muffins—down. Charm, Spin, an’ Color divvied up a bowla oatmeal. ’Nother rum-Coke for the doggie.
“I’m not entirely certain, Bemie. Win’s on his way back from St. Charles-Auraria. We thought we’d save you another hour in durance vile.” He dipped his muzzle delicately into his glass; it fizzed around his whiskers as he finished it. I punched up another round for both of us.
“Well, I been in duransh—durances a lot viler.” I watched the Freenies squattin’ on their oatmeal, shuddered, an’ gulped the resta m’drink. “Lishen, I don’ wanna sheem noshy or nothin’, but—”
“But it ishn’t every day”—the animal grinned, black eyes sparklin’—“you drink breakfasht with a talking coyote?” He hiccupped, eyes dartin’ suspiciously around t’see who’d made that noise.
“Shomethin’ like that. Gorillash, chimpses—” I nodded to the TV porno-host still sloshin’ around—“even dol-phinshes, all got lotsa cranial capacitidity—-capacitude. Jushta mattera leamin’ shomebody elshe’s lingo. But, well...” I sputtered awkwardly, lookin’ at his narrow canine skull. “I wouldn’ta thought coyotes’d have...” “Ordinarily,” Nahuatl replied, uncrossin’ his eyes, “you’d be right. But you shee”—he sighed lugubriously, a tear rollin’ down his muzzle—“I’m the firsht—and lasht—of my kind.”
Civilization (explained G. Howell Nahuatl—makin’ some allowances for alcoholic diction), is presently undergoing a transition, from nanoelectronics, which produced the Telecom, for example, to gigaelectronics—a reduction in scale, an increase in capacities, of several orders of magnitude— which, among other things, has produced me.
I was bom a relatively run-of-the-litter coyote. My mother was third generation at the Gallatinopolis Zoo, up in the Dakotas. Except that I arrived as a result of some rather special gene-selection. Even without what came afterward, I would have become a genius among coyotes, more intelligent than any domestic canine, perhaps even brighter than the average Poland-China hog. But Aloysius Sourwine had plans for me, and great hopes: I was to be a four-legged Benedict Arnold.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of sheep and young cattle are killed by my species. We are a crafty race, fast on our feet, extremely adaptable. Like the cockroach and the rat, we will prosper even unto the end of time, whereas your people have yet to prove themselves. Why, there are wild coyotes living comfortably within the city limits of Laporte.
Thus, there seemed no safe, economic method of eliminating coyotes as agricultural pests. Shooting, as my master once observed, only culls the slow among us; poisoning, the stupid. At that rate of selection, we’d be running ranches of our own within the next few centuries.
At which point my master, Aloysius Sourwine, slapped a massive hand upon the sunburn line across his forehead, nearly giving himself a concussion: why not turn the joke into reality, accelerate the process, create a breed of coyote which could help with the vermin problem? “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”—or, more appositely, “set a thief to catch a thief.”
Thus followed the impressively expensive genetic recombination which culminated in my birth—along with an even more costly effort in gigaelectronics. At six weeks, they implanted on my cortex the most sophisticated circuitry the Confederacy was capable of producing. In sum, I became a supercoyote with artificially supplemented intelligence—a weapon, aimed at shielding sheep and cattle from the predations of my own kind. The Great Plains Stockmen’s Association were delighted—until they learned they’d done too good a job.
You see, under Confederate customs, the sole criterion establishing individual rights—what other civilizations would call “citizenship”—is intelligence. A gorilla can tell dirty jokes; a chimpanzee can debate metaphysics; a porpoise can argue politics; an Orca—“killer whale,” and I take it you’ve yet to encounter one of them—can beat you at chess. All, including human beings, can stand up, at least figuratively, demanding, in clear grammatical English, Spanish, Danish, Quebecjois, or Dolphish, respect for their sovereign individuality.
And so, embarrassingly enough, could I.
I was not entirely without sympathy for the Great Plains Stockmen’s Association. At the urging of my master, they’d invested a great deal in me, and now it was lost. There are two and only two kinds of entity in the universe: people and property. The former cannot be owned, except, in a manner of speaking, by themselves. The ethical basis for every social, political, and economic transaction is Confederate culture, this is why simians and cetaceans have rights, why the young of every intelligent species may not be treated as chattel. You cannot own a sovereign individual.
Everything else—land and natural resources, artifacts, abstractions such as contractual relationships and orbital positions, wnintelligent animals—everything else is property, either owned, abandoned, or as-yet-unclaimed. I was to have been property, a useful subsapient asset with no more rights—nor any more conception of them—than one of those hovercraft out in the street.
How well I recall that fateful day at the Cheyenne Stock Show. I was still only a pup, and my memories of the time are highly influenced by later intellectual development. But the data—the sights, sounds, and oh, the smells—are unerringly recorded, probably by the electronic component of my mind. There was acrimonious debate between Sourwine and his friends with the officials whether I was to be considered livestock—like the border collies and other sheepdogs—or an item of farm technology, such as a tracior or geostationary reflector.
They stood about my little cage, arguing and arguing, until I grew impatient. Their voices, PA announcements of 5H awards, the roller-coaster outside, were painful to my sensitive hearing. Finally, in exasperation, I said, “What could be more simple—I’ll compete in both categories!”
I’d like to tell you that my owners, his associates, and the judges were shocked into silence. It was the first I’d ever spoken, indeed even thought to do so. I’d like to tell you that. However, the canine tongue and jaw aren’t suited to human speech, and what emerged was a garbled mewling. Sourwine thought I was ill. It took me several tries to get my message across, by which time the humor was lost on everyone, including myself.
Even now, observe how my voice issues from a transducer on my collar, much in the manner of simian wrist-voders, except that mine is synched directly to brain impulses. Chimpanzees and gorillas originally spoke Ames-lan—sign language—and their speech devices key to subliminal movements of the hand and wrist.
No, the profound astonishment I’d awaited was slower in arriving, and mostly in the context of my creators’ pock-etbooks. Sourwine took it philosophically. He became a father to me, tutoring me in the ways of the world. In turn, I did the job I’d been designed for, watching his flocks. When he passed away at the untimely age of ninety-seven, I found he’d left his property to me.
Thus, I became a gentleman rancher. These days I hire two-legged shepherds, for, sad truth to tell, I loathe anything even remotely bucolic, even the produce section of grocery stores. The paradigm and puzzle of sapience is that there is no accounting for—or predicting—individual preferences. My true ambition was to be an operatic tenor.
Instead, I became the world’s first consulting private nose.
This was Win Bear’s doing: some years ago, I was herding for Aloysius Sourwine, baying Lohengrin at the moon in reflection that my life seemed somehow—incomplete.
The further I examined this conundrum, the firmer my conclusion: I needed to get laid.
More, I had the natural mammalian desire to generate progeny amidst the domestic tranquility of amiable companionship. In my case, the circumstances were hideously complicated. I couldn’t bring myself to mate with a female of my own species. That would be rather... let me see... like your choosing prefrontally lobotomized women. I
’m sure this might suit some men perfectly, but I hoped for some intelligent conversation with my afterglow cigarette. This is a Free System: it might not be impossible to find a human or simian female. But I doubted I could find a rational one I wouldn’t have to pay. I wanted more than that.
Discussing this with Aloysius Sourwine, we agreed, since the most expensive research had been done already, that we’d attempt to build me a wife. After all, nothing was too good for his son, the opera singer. The enterprise proceeded, and I had reason to be grateful that we coyotes mature rapidly.
She was beautiful, my Elsa, even as a new-born puppy, with dark silky fur, long eyelashes, and two dramatic lighter strokes either side of her forehead that zig-zagged up to her ears. Her eyes held a wild, untamed expression in their depths which promised of passion.
Since we knew from the beginning that she’d be sapient, no effort was spared in her education: philosophy, music, self-defense, literature, and the arts. She absorbed them ail eagerly, and my days with her were filled with joyous sunlight—and anticipation.
Then she matured—and broke my heart.
No, it wasn’t that she didn’t love me. I believe I might have suffered that, somehow, understanding, as I do, the vagaries of individual taste. Nor was it anything else I was prepared to encompass.
You humans, having developed naturally over thousands of centuries, have lost every laboratory-detectable remnant of instinct. Beyond brief, simple reflexes and drive states, nature doesn’t tell you how to satisfy; you have no inborn knowledge, not of sex, nor how to feed yourselves, nor even walk. This is a great virtue, for it renders your potentials limitless. I suspect that much the same is true of simians and cetaceans, that everything they know is learned.
Instinct, however, apparently is far stronger in the female of my species than the male. Or it may be another matter of individual differences. Within a few weeks of her passage into ripe, desirable adulthood, my Elsa vanished, fleeing this civilization she knew well in every detail, for the wide, wild prairie and a life of savagery.
She tried. She certainly tried with me. There were long emotional sessions you wouldn’t call conversation, bittersweet unsatisfying love-making, and she seemed torn between consciousness and instinct, not knowing what it was she really wanted. When she became pregnant, instinct overwhelmed her totally. I found her speaking-collar on the Telecom console, with a personal recording whose contents I’m sure you can infer.
After days of grieving and lament, I consulted a commercial directory for help. I was certain that if I could only find her, I could persuade her to come back to me. I’d even spend a portion of the year with her, pretending to be a wild animal. Anything. I loved her.
I sent a graphics message rather than ’comming in person and instructed this “Win Bear” I’d selected, a “Consulting Investigator,” not to be surprised at whatever he encountered when he reached my home. I gave him the impression I was an eccentric recluse, and that wasn’t too inaccurate by now: I’d suffered yet another loss—old Aloysius Sour-wine—and was living in a condominium in Cheyenne.
I met Win at the door without a word, took his hat in my teeth, trotted into the living room like a trained fox terrier, and sat on the couch. Win had followed and sat, too, as if waiting for my master to make his entrance. “Mister Bear,” I said finally, “I need help badly!”
“So do I! I think I just heard a coyote talking to me!” And so, of course, he had. Several drinks and a long explanation later, he agreed to help me search for Elsa— this sort of domestic case being not unprecedented with him when he examined it in the proper light. Although she’d left her collar, the implanted circuitry, he reasoned, ought to radiate enough faint, incidental signal to track her. He, in turn, consulted with two physicists at Laporte University, Limited—a human female and a porpoise—who supplied him with suitable equipment. That and a sport hovercraft convertible to flight were all we required.
I found her in what had been northern Montana before Confederation, living in a burrow with our pups.
“Elsa!” It was dark and dirty, underground, strewn with the remains of prey, roofed with the drying roots of the prairie grass above. The children were still blind, whimpering and tumbling over one another ceaselessly, occasionally nursing. I could scarcely bring myself to look at them for fear I’d want to stay in this unsightly purgatory. I felt then that dying would be a blessedly welcome release.
“How have you been, Howell? Still practicing for the Cheyenne Operatic League?” I’d brought her speech collar, equipped as mine to crawl into place by itself at the clumsy paw-touch of a stud on its surface. She looked worn and tired, her fur dull and matted.
“Well, no.” I tried desperately to keep my voice light and even. “My singing’s adequate, but they don’t have a suit of armor to fit me, nor do they fancy my crawling about the stage on all—Elsa, why are we discussing these trivia? I came to take you home! Aloysius has passed away; we have a ranch now, everything we’ll ever—”
“Except freedom, Howell.” Her lack of remorse, the absence of even the faintest longing for our old life, ripped me apart. “I can’t live the way you want me to. It’s not that I don’t—but I—I just can't!"
“Is it the wild males?” I asked, half fearful, half resigned at her answer.
She laughed. “Since the pups came, I’ve spent most of my time keeping the local talent from raping me and eating them. No, Howell, this is simply the way I was meant to live. I know you disapprove: this den is a fleabag, but I dug it myself, knowing how without ever being told, and it’s mine.”
I nodded sadly. “Elsa, something inside me persists in believing that there are words to change your mind. But I haven’t found them, not now, and not before. I love you, and I can’t help wondering why that shouldn’t make a difference. Life is a hollow mockery without you. Don’t you miss me, even a little?”
“Of course I do,” she said heartlessly. Talk is cheap, and words of love the cheapest. “I’ve even absorbed enough human culture to realize that the pups need a father. But Ihere’s nothing you can do for us; obviously, we don’t need money—”
I turned, knowing that if I didn’t leave, I’d sacrifice myself to an existence I abominated just to be with her. “A man is waiting,” I said inanely. “I’ve got to be going.” And I went.
It took me a week to get rid of the fleas.
Now I limit my musical aspiration to the bath. I can sniff the scene of a crime, follow a trail, and identify the culprit amidst a crowd of thousands in the Underground. And in the leg-man business, four are superior to two.
No one would believe my capabilities, at first—except Win. I appeared before an arbiter, certified myself in a series of exhaustive tests, and now any judge on the continent will credit my testimony. I’ve quadrupled Sourwine’s wealth; my nose is my fortune.
And Bernie, the yearning for Elsa never ceases.
It’s a fragile thing, this believing in life. I gain it and I lose it, day by day, minute by minute. I gain it and lose it again. Yet I’ve learned that I must never reveal the part of me which doesn’t believe, that which hurts eternally and despairs of ever again finding a reason for believing. Friends claim such revelation doesn’t bother them—it’s what they want to be trusted to see—but it isn’t true. At least not for very long.
We are all predators, my friend, and the only roles we truly understand are conqueror—or clown.
It’s a dog’s life.
The Freenies gathered around sympathetically, dis-provin’ Howell’s thesis—as he’d disproved it by tellin’ us about it. One of ’em extruded a manipulator, pattin’ the coyote on the shoulder. I sniffed back a tear an’ got up woozily from the bed. Sober t’drunk t’hung-over, all in an hour an’ a half. Some mornin’!
“Well,” Howell said, doin’ some recoverin’ himself, “I didn’t intend telling the story of my life. We must get out of here and join Win at his house.”
I looked around—hadn’t brought anythin
g, an’ I wasn’t collectin’ little plastic razors. “How d’we check outa this upholstered dump?”
“Follow me.” He shook his head, an’ his eyes crossed again momentarily.
Every footstep bangin’ in m’head like a gong, we trooped down the hall to the front desk. The clerk was lookin’ unhappy, too. Howell gave him some Telecom coordinates.
“As you see,” the private nose said, “charges against Captain Gruenblum and his associates have been vacated.
I suggest you return his weapons and effects.”
“Who’s paying?” the chimpanzee tersely said, probably on accounta I hadn’t rendered him a gratuity the night before.
“Gimme my stuff, pal, an’ I’ll take care of you—say, what’s that ruckus outside?”
“Your public,” the clerk answered. “You wouldn’t want to sign this waiver before you leave, would you? Clears us of personal liability and—no, I didn’t think so.”
Through the glass front doors, I could see an ugly-lookin’ crowd gathered in the parkin’ lot, laden with some kinda equipment. I slung the gunbelt around my middle, buckled it, an’ plopped a gold coin on the counter. “That cover the damage?”
The chimp’s eyebrows shot up. He punched more numbers an’ returned a fistful of silver an’ copper. “Your receipt’s been registered in the net. I’d say come back and see us, but—”
SLAM! Both front doors bashed aside, pressed to the walls by a pink an’ furry avalanche of sapients, most of ’em pointin’ microphones an’ twin-lensed cameras. Lights, brighter’n the sun, burned into my optics.