by Nancy Kress
I felt grateful.
Green said, “This dog does not—”
“I know, I know. Listen, Green, what to do now? Bring another dog here?”
“Yes.”
“I choose the dog. I am the…the dog leader. Some dogs behave correctly, some dogs do not behave correctly. I choose. Me.”
I held my breath. Green considered, or conferred with Blue, or consulted its alien and inadequate programming. Who the hell knows? The robot had been created by a race that preferred Earth dogs to whatever species usually nurtured their young, if any did. Maybe Mangy and Not-Too would replace parental care on the home planet, thus introducing the idea of babysitters. All I wanted was to not be eaten by some canine nanny-trainee.
“Yes,” Green said finally, and I let out my breath.
A few minutes later, eighteen dog cages tumbled through the wall like so much garbage, the dogs within bouncing off their bars and mesh tops, furious and noisy. Mangy jumped, curled more protectively around her oblivious larva, and added her weird, rock-scraping bark to the din. A cage grew up around her. When the cages had stopped bouncing, I walked among them like some kind of tattered lord, choosing.
“This dog, Green.” It wasn’t the smallest dog but it had stopped barking the soonest. I hoped that meant it wasn’t a grudge holder. When I put one hand into its cage, it didn’t bite me, also a good sign. The dog was phenomenally ugly, the jowls on its face drooping from small, rheumy eyes into a sort of folded ruff around its short neck. Its body seemed to be all front, with stunted and short back legs. When it stood, I saw it was male.
“This dog? What to do now?”
“Send all the other dogs back.”
The cages sank into the floor. I walked over to the feeding trough, scooped up handfuls of dog food, and put the pellets into my only pocket that didn’t have holes. “Make all the rest of the dog food go away.”
It vaporized.
“Make this dog’s cage go away.”
I braced myself as the cage dissolved. The dog stood uncertainly on the floor, gazing toward Mangy, who snarled at him. I said, as commandingly as possible, “Ruff!”
He looked at me.
“Ruff, come.”
To my surprise, he did. Someone had trained this animal before. I gave him a pellet of dog food.
Green said, “This dog behaves correctly.”
“Well, I’m really good,” I told him, stupidly, while my chest tightened as I thought of Not-Too. The aliens, or their machines, did understand about anesthetic, didn’t they? They wouldn’t let her suffer too much? I would never know.
But now I did know something momentous. I had choices. I had chosen which room to train dogs in. I had chosen which dog to train. I had some control.
“Sit,” I said to Ruff, who didn’t, and I set to work.
Not-Too was returned to me three or four “days” later. She was gray and hairless, with an altered bark. A grub hung onto her elongated tail, undoubtedly the same one that had vanished from its cage while I was asleep. But unlike Mangy, who’d never liked either of us, Not-Too was ecstatic to see me. She wouldn’t stay in her grub-cage against the wall but insisted on sleeping curled up next to me, grub and all. Green permitted this. I had become the alpha dog.
Not-Too liked Ruff, too. I caught him mounting her, her very long tail conveniently keeping her grub out of the way. Did Green understand the significance of this behavior? No way to tell.
We settled into a routine of training, sleeping, playing, eating. Ruff turned out to be sweet and playful but not very intelligent, and training took a long time. Mangy’s grub grew very slowly, considering the large amount of glop it consumed. I grew, too; the waistband of my ragged pants got too tight and I discarded them, settling for a loin cloth, shirt, and my decaying boots. I talked to the dogs, who were much better conversationalists than Green since two of them at least pricked up their ears, made noises back at me, and wriggled joyfully at attention. Green would have been a dud at a cocktail party.
I don’t know how long this all went on. Time began to lose meaning. I still dreamed of Zack and still woke in tears, but the dreams grew gentler and farther apart. When I cried, Not-Too crawled onto my lap, dragging her grub, and licked my chin. Her brown eyes shared my sorrow. I wondered how I had ever preferred the disdain of cats.
Not-Too got pregnant. I could feel the puppies growing inside her distended belly.
“Puppies will be easy to make behave correctly,” I told Green, who said nothing. Probably he didn’t understand. Some people need concrete visuals in order to learn.
Eventually, it seemed to me that Ruff was almost ready for his own grub. I mulled over how to mention this to Green but before I did, everything came to an end.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
I jerked awake and bolted upright. The alarm—a very human-sounding alarm—sounded all around me. Dogs barked and howled. Then I realized that it was a human alarm, coming from the Army camp outside the Dome, on the opposite side to garbage dump. I could see the camp—in outline and faintly, as if through heavy gray fog. The Dome was dissolving.
“Green—what—no!”
Above me, transforming the whole top half of what had been the Dome, was the bottom of a solid saucer. Mangy, in her cage, floated upwards and disappeared into a gap in the saucer’s underside. The other grub cages had already disappeared. I glimpsed a flash of metallic color through the gap: Blue. Green was halfway to the opening, drifting lazily upward. Beside me, both Not-Too and Ruff began to rise.
“No! No!”
I hung onto Not-Too, who howled and barked. But then my body froze. I couldn’t move anything. My hands opened and Not-Too rose, yowling piteously.
“No! No!” And then, before I knew I was going to say it, “Take me, too!” Green paused in mid-air. I began babbling.
“Take me! Take me! I can make the dogs behave correctly—I can—you need me! Why are you going? Take me!”
“Take this human?”
Not Green but Blue, emerging from the gap. Around me the Dome walls thinned more. Soldiers rushed toward us. Guns fired.
“Yes! What to do? Take this human! The dogs want this human!”
Time stood still. Not-Too howled and tried to reach me. Maybe that’s what did it. I rose into the air just as Blue said, “Why the hell not?”
Inside—inside what?—I was too stunned to do more than grab Not-Too, hang on, and gasp. The gap closed. The saucer rose.
After a few minutes, I sat up and looked around. Gray room, filled with dogs in their cages, with grubs in theirs, with noise and confusion and the two robots. The sensation of motion ceased. I gasped, “Where…where are we going?”
Blue answered. “Home.”
“Why?”
“The humans do not behave correctly.” And then, “What to do now?”
We were leaving Earth in a flying saucer, and it was asking me?
Over time—I have no idea how much time—I actually got some answers from Blue. The humans not behaving correctly had apparently succeeding in breaching one of the Domes somewhere. They must have used a nuclear bomb, but that I couldn’t verify. Grubs and dogs had both died, and so the aliens had packed up and left Earth. Without, as far as I could tell, retaliating. Maybe.
If I had stayed, I told myself, the soldiers would have shot me. Or I would have returned to life in the camp, where I would have died of dysentery or violence or cholera or starvation. Or I would have been locked away by whatever government still existed in the cities, a freak who had lived with aliens, none of my story believed. I barely believed it myself.
I am a freak who lives with aliens. Furthermore, I live knowing that at any moment Blue or Green or their “masters” might decide to vaporize me. But that’s really not much different from the uncertainty of life in the camp, and here I actually have some status. Blue produces whatever I ask for, once I get him to understand what that is. I have new clothes, good food, a bed, paper, a sort of pencil.
And I have the dogs. Mangy still doesn’t like me. Her larva hasn’t as yet done whatever it will do next. Not-Too’s grub grows slowly, and now Ruff has one, too. Their three puppies are adorable and very trainable. I’m not so sure about the other seventeen dogs, some of whom look wilder than ever after their long confinement in small cages. Aliens are not, by definition, humane.
I don’t know what it will take to survive when, and if, we reach “home” and I meet the alien adults. All I can do is rely on Jill’s Five Laws of Survival:
#1: Take what you can get.
#2: Show no fear.
#3: Never volunteer.
#4: Notice everything.
But the Fifth Law has changed. As I lie beside Not-Too and Ruff, their sweet warmth and doggie-odor, I know that my first formulation was wrong. “Feel nothing”—that can take you some ways toward survival, but not very far. Not really.
Law #5: Take the risk. Love something.
The dogs whuff contentedly and we speed toward the stars.
Afterword to “Laws of Survival”
In 2002 I acquired a dog (Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle) and since then, my fiction has been full of dogs. A novel, titled Dogs (“Tell it like it is, baby”) was rejected by several publishers who said they loved the writing, the characters, the plot—“but you kill dogs!” Apparently you can wipe out entire star systems of humans, but don’t touch a canine.
“Laws of Survival” kills a few, from necessity. Jill doesn’t have much, but she has a strong will to keep on living. She also has resourcefulness, plus adaptability to genuinely bizarre circumstances. What more do any of us need?
Maybe a dog.
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME
“I still hate this,” Trevor said. “That you’re doing this to Becky.”
“So you’ve told me,” I said wearily. “Many times.”
We sat in the clinic waiting room, done in Martian rust reds, very trendy for such an illegal operation. But, then, this was very upscale illegality. Trevor, who had so much money he never thought about it, hadn’t asked how I was paying for Becky’s surgery, and I hadn’t volunteered that I’d cashed in my retirement fund at Payne, Jeffers. We’d been waiting on the rust-red conformachairs, which were not as comfortable as advertised, for nearly an hour.
Trevor scowled at me. “Amanda, as a tactic this lacks—”
“Sweetness,” I said. “I know. I’m not a sweet person, Trevor. This is a surprise? You’ve known this about me since we were nine. We didn’t become friends because you value sweetness.”
“I didn’t—”
But I was, all at once, beyond restraint. I turned on him. “And Jake didn’t marry me for sweetness, either. Who wants to go to bed with a lump of marzipan—he used to say that to me! And he didn’t leave me for lack of sweetness, either, or he wouldn’t have chosen…what does she have that I don’t?”
My voice had risen to a shout. The three other people in the waiting room, two of whom were holo-masked, stared. I twisted my hands together and spoke more softly. “He’s just erased me from his life. That’s what I really can’t stand—that he acts like I never existed at all.”
Trevor put his arms around me. I collapsed against his thin chest and narrow shoulders—delicate frames were hot just now with gays—and sobbed quietly. The man sitting two chairs away moved to four chairs away.
After I finally blew my nose, I said, “Trevvy, I have to know. Jake was the love of my life.”
“Jake is a cheating and lying bastard, and anyway, I’m the love of your life.”
“Not carnally.”
“Overrated.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Well, no.” He held me at arm’s length. “You look like a dead spot in the ocean. Go put on some makeup. Obsession is not a good look for you. Anyway, Becky should be the love of your life.”
His expression stopped my remaining sniffles. Trevor always smiles and he is never, ever critical of me. Not seriously. I said, “She is.”
He didn’t bother to correct the lie. But he looked away from me, and something in my neck went cold. I’d lost my soon-to-be-ex husband. If I lost Trevor, too….
“I’m here, Amanda. Always. And no, I don’t need sweetness from you. I just need—”
My wristband brightened and said, “Ms. Rydder, the surgery went fine, and you can see Rebecca now. First door to your left.”
I charged through the door. Becky lay in a smartcrib, watching a holo-mobile two feet above her. Bright, nonexistent shapes twisted and flowed in the air. Becky’s plump little hands reached for them until she saw me. She crowed with delight, and I picked her up and cuddled her, studying her right eye.
It was clear, stained-glass green with thick, dark lashes. Just like Jake’s eyes.
No scars on the smooth baby skin.
No grogginess from the anesthesia, no pain, no cloudiness in her iris.
You couldn’t tell that anything had been done to her at all.
Using the software was as uncomplicated as the implant itself. What was hard was setting it up. The manufacturer doesn’t do that for you, understanding more than anyone the absolute necessity of customized, unhackable encryption on dedicated and shielded computers. Most wearers of Opti-Cam implants are not six-month-old infants. Last month alone, six major mobsters were indicted and an Asian dictator assassinated using information from Opti-Cams.
Trevor set up my system. It was pretty minimal: receiver, screen, retransmitter, basic encryption. He protested the retransmitter. “This data isn’t something you should view on anything but this one screen here in your bedroom, off-line for all the Internets. Don’t retransmit to your wrister or, quod di prohibeant, to any screen anywhere at your job. Do I have to remind you that this whole setup is illegal?”
“Just get it working. And drop the Latin—it’s pretentious.”
“You never did have any sense of verbal fashion, Mandy. No, don’t touch that…wait a minute…there.”
The screen brightened to an expanse of white. I was about to protest that the system didn’t work when I realized: Becky was staring at the ceiling.
She lay in her crib across the room, drowsy and blinking. The white expanse disappeared, reappeared, disappeared again. I said, too shrilly, “Mobile on,” and her smartcrib activated it. Becky’s eyes opened wide and she cooed. My screen showed somersaulting kittens made of light, seen from Becky’s perspective as the camera behind her cornea sent its images to the receiver.
“Mobile off.” The kittens disappeared. I crossed the room and loomed over Becky, looking back over my shoulder. On-screen was her view of me, head turned away.
Trevor said, “I still don’t think you’ve thought this through. And I still hate it. Becky—”
“Won’t know a thing. She doesn’t feel the implant, and the images don’t get stored in her brain, at least not any more than they would from her own vision. Nothing connects to her memory. There are dozens of studies proving that.”
“With adult subjects. Not infants.”
“Infants remember even less than we do.”
“I wish you remembered less,” Trevor said. “Remembered less, felt less, schemed less—”
I’d stopped listening to him. I watched Becky watch me until her lids fell into sleep and the screen went blank.
This was Wednesday. On Friday Jake would pick up Becky for his weekend of shared custody.
“What’s with you?” Felicity said to me in the ladies’ room nearest our cubicles. “You’re jumpy as a cat.”
“Cats aren’t particularly jumpy. Neither am I. Just stressed about the GloBiz account.”
Felicity frowned, but before she could point out that GloBiz was consistently thrilled with our campaign for them, I was out of the ladies’ room, out of the building, in a cab home. Only 4:00 p.m., but so what? Even a copywriter deserves a dangerous, illegal, utterly stupid hobby.
In my bedroom I turned on the dedicated computer. Becky gazed at th
e back of a head in a moving car. One head, not two. Jake, alone, had picked her up at day care.
Then his apartment, not Pam’s. I had never been inside either one, but I recognized his half of what had once been our furniture. He put Becky on the floor to crawl, and whenever she glanced over at him, I glimpsed the slippers I’d given him for his last birthday.
In college, I’d been a film major. No Fellini retrospective, no Welles film work, had ever enthralled me like the images on my screen that Friday evening. Jake’s slippers, Becky’s toys, a rubber ducky floating in the bathtub. Quick shots of Jake’s face, laughing or talking to her—why didn’t the implant have audio! Pam did not appear. When Becky finally fell asleep, I turned off the computer and then sat for a long time in the dark, tears running down my face, rage in my heart.
He had no right to do this to me. To Becky. To live his life as if I’d never occupied the center of it.
At midnight I gave in and keyed his number into my cell. He answered sleepily. “Hello?”
Not breathing, I clutched the phone.
More sharply: “Hello?” And then, “Amanda, if this is you, you’re violating the restraining order. Please stop. I mean it this time. I’ll go back to court if I have to.”
I said nothing. Tears and rage, tears and rage. Long after he hung up, I clutched the phone as if I could crush it.
On Saturday, Pam appeared in Becky’s field of vision.
At first I got only flashes of her; Becky was not interested in focusing on this unknown person. It was eerie to glimpse a red-shirted elbow, the toe of a black boot, the back of a blond head. It disassembled her, made her less than real. Eventually, however, she sat down in front of Becky and fed the baby strained applesauce.