by John Kessel
“I don’t know—you have a good grasp of sarcasm. I can’t answer these questions, but here’s what I can tell you: I want to do ordinary work to support the people I live among. I’m not interested in destroying the Society; I want to reform it.
“I don’t wish Mira any ill. I don’t wish Hypatia or the Board of Matrons any ill. I don’t wish Roz Baldwin any ill. I just want to be left to do what I need to do. I’m not going away. I am a citizen of the Society. But despite those images on young girls’ walls, I am not any kind of leader. I suspect you exaggerate the degree to which others care about any of this. I’m just a person doing, at last, some useful work. There are a lot of us here.”
“Nicely said. The Aristarchus Olympic team might have wished you’d pursued your talent for political rhetoric instead of Ruăn tā. But I joke. I, and my viewers all over the moon, thank you for your time, Carey.” Sirius held out his handpaw.
Carey leaned forward and took it. “It’s been my pleasure.”
The lights went down.
“That was perfect,” Sirius said. “Enough surprises to suck in the fans, but enough of the old themes to reassure the ones who aren’t paying much attention. You reject victimization without forsaking the sympathy of the ones who see you as a victim. You present as an autonomous man and a tool at the same time.”
Carey stood up and stretched. He towered over the dog. “You make it sound calculated.”
“It wasn’t? Then you have a natural gift for bullshit. You undercut Hypatia—‘an exhausting damage control problem,’ that was brilliant—without leaving yourself open to accusations you’re undercutting her. She’s the egomaniac, you’re the natural voice of the opposition.”
“I’m not the voice of anybody.”
“That’s it! Exactly the image you need to project.”
Why was Sirius trying to antagonize him? Were the cameras still running, hoping to pick up some show of anger, or catch him in some contradiction? Sirius had risen in the lunar media by courting controversy, yet never truly challenged the assumptions of his audience or producers.
“If you’ll excuse me, then, I’ll go,” Carey said.
Sirius looked about the bower. No one was near. “Not yet. I need to speak to you about a proposition.”
“Are you still recording?
Sirius lifted a handpaw and waved the cameras away. They floated off among the trees. “Done. We’re in complete isolation here.”
Carey sat back down. “So?”
Sirius stretched his handpaws, flexing the rudimentary beringed thumb that showed through his white half-gloves. “This situation is no less combustible than it was before the election. The SCOCOM report is going to be negative—it will inflame suspicions against the Society. Eventually, the OLS is going to intervene.”
“An intervention would be a disaster—for everyone concerned.”
“Nevertheless, it will come. You are in a position to do something for yourself and the Society you profess to care about. There will be a regime change. There will be a new government. It will be imposed from without, but at the top it will have to be led by a citizen of the Society. If anything of your social structure is going to be preserved, the person leading the new government will have to be someone who cares for the ideas on which the Society was founded.”
“That’s a lot of speculation.”
“The persons who employ me—we’ll let them remain nameless—are prepared to see that you are offered this job. You would be the governor of the Cousins Protectorate.”
“It won’t happen.”
“Then perhaps your army will repulse the OLS troops when they arrive. Oh, that’s right—you have no army. When the takeover happens, the only way the things you have established here will have any chance of persisting will be if someone like you is in a position to stand between the OLS and the Society. To advocate on its behalf, with some chance to be heard. Why not let that person be you?”
“I won’t do it. And I won’t be quiet about it. I’ll tell people you’ve made this offer.”
“Speak to whomever you please,” Sirius said, and even the barrier of his canine accent could not hide his disgust. “I expect they will see the simple truth of what I say.”
Gracie came back and once again spoke into the dog’s ear. Sirius flexed his handpaws, then hopped off his chair. “Oh, and while you are telling your friends about this offer, why don’t you tell them about your mother’s invention? Shouldn’t people have all the information essential to make informed political decisions?”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
MIRA PULLED BACK FROM THEIR kiss. She felt Erno’s fingertips tangled in the hair at the back of her head. It was the hand he’d said was artificial.
But he avoided her eyes. “They’re gone,” he said.
“Let’s wait.” She studied his face. She’d been thinking about kissing him from the moment he showed up in the lab. Maybe it was that he had no place here, and nothing would come of it. Maybe it was because he was from far enough back in her past that he had not seen her fail at every relationship in her life. “How did you get that hand?”
“My hand?” He held it between them, looked at it warily. “I stole it.”
She listened to his steady breathing. His watchfulness was not the aggrieved adolescence he’d stewed in before his exile. The kiss hung between them, unacknowledged.
“Who did you steal it from?”
“A man in trouble.” Erno peeked through the cab window into the reactor room, then settled back down. He seemed uncomfortable in a way he had not been even when the constables had been searching a couple of meters away. His eyes met hers. “In the patriarchies it’s not like here, where you can’t fall through the bottom of society without somebody stepping in. Out there, if you don’t have a family, you’re finished.”
“As often as not, family’s the problem,” Mira said. She turned her cheek, thinking he might lean closer. He didn’t.
“Sure, I used to hate my mother hovering. I never really understood how much I missed this place until I got off that cable train. You don’t know what being kept down is until you’ve been a guest worker.”
“Still complaining,” she said. “You used to rant against the Matrons; now it’s the patriarchies. You’re a rich man, married into a powerful family, named to a government commission. You should do something with that power instead of complaining.”
Erno shook his head. “I must be a lousy kisser.”
“Pretty much the same as everyone,” Mira said.
“From a kiss to a takedown, just like that.” He didn’t sound hurt. “The classic Mira playbook.”
“You don’t know me that well.”
“I’ve been wanting to kiss you since I was fourteen.”
“You wanted to kiss everyone. You had sex with any woman who would have sex with you. Never even tried with me.”
“You were the one person I knew who was as angry as I was. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to draw your number in some sex practicum.”
“You could have just asked.”
“As if you would have said yes.”
“You asked every female in sight. Why not me?”
Erno said nothing. “Why did you turn on Carey Evasson?”
“He hurt me. He really wasn’t taking care of Val. Hypatia thought she had me in her pocket. A half dozen other reasons. Human behavior is overdetermined.”
“I was never impressed with him,” Erno said. “His snide little book.”
She would not let him evade the implications of their kiss. “So, why not me?”
“If you want to know—your brother. You and Marco were a closed system. You trusted him more than any of us. You might tease him but heaven help any other person who did.”
“We were siblings. More than that—Marco was my Y-clone.”
“You don’t miss that connection until it’s gone,” Erno said. “My sister and aunts won’t even talk to me now. At least you’ve got hi
m.”
“Marco’s dead,” she said.
She opened the cab door and got out of the truck. Erno climbed out and came around to her side. He stood there stupidly, hands at his sides. “I didn’t know.”
Mira turned her back on him.
“What happened?”
“A year after you left my mother emigrated. She was lousy at networking, worse at marriage. She had no real allies. Marco was one of her bad ideas—she imagined having a son in addition to a daughter would make us a family, when she didn’t want either of us.”
Mira looked at the exit light over the lab doors, blinked until the red became a blur. “She left Marco with me,” she told Erno, “then she disappeared. I wasn’t old enough. Nobody falls through the bottom here? Well, no one seemed to care about Marco and me.”
As she spoke, the emotion welled up in her. “I let him take too many risks. Marco was killed in a flying accident. I should have stopped him. No one else could stop him but I could. But I didn’t—and he died.”
Mira held back her tears. She felt Erno’s hand on her shoulder. When she turned to face him he said, “I’m sorry.”
“It happened because of the way we live. So I became Looker, and started making my videos.”
Erno didn’t say anything for a moment. “I remember Marco would always be waiting for you at the end of the school day. You used to get annoyed. He didn’t like it when you started hanging out with Alicia and the other women.”
“He always wanted to be with me.”
“My mother complained about you. When you got that maintenance worker in trouble, she was one of the constables who arrested him.”
“Teddy Dorasson.” The thought of him made her feel guilty. “I didn’t mean to get him in trouble. I just needed to get away from the girls’ retreat, and he was my way out.” Mira pushed the truck door closed until the latch clicked. “It must be an hour since we came in here,” she said. “The constables are gone.”
Erno didn’t move. “Did the Matrons really ignore you after your mother left? They hardly leave anyone alone, let alone boys without mothers.”
Mira looked up at him. “Do you think I’m lying?”
“I’m not denying what you feel.” His voice was low.
“I already blame myself for it,” she said. “I never stop blaming myself. What’s your point?”
“I’m sorry. The Matrons should have offered you more help.”
“They offered plenty of help. We didn’t want their help.”
“You don’t have to persuade me,” he said, an edge coming to his voice. “When Sirius asks your take on the custody hearing, tell him your story. It will be a big hit in Persepolis, and really boost the image of the Society in the OLS.”
“Fuck you,” Mira said. She pushed past him to circle the reactor.
Instead of following, Erno flicked on the lab’s lights and returned to the wall he’d been examining. Still fuming, she stopped pacing and stared at him.
His back was to her. He said, “I’m sorry I said anything.”
Mira crossed her arms, trying to quiet her racing heart. Erno’s shoulders were hunched and he had his left hand splayed flat against the wall.
“Are we done?” she asked.
“Not yet—bear with me.”
“Hurry up.”
Erno spent the next ten minutes placing his left hand carefully against the lab wall in various spots, moving steadily along, as if measuring it for drapes. She watched, mind whirling with anger and shame.
Erno had always been arrogant even though he had no accomplishments that justified arrogance. His poems, his politics, his lies. He called Carey self-involved, but he paid attention only to what mattered to him.
Except—except how could what he’d said hurt her so much if it was wrong? It was like he’d zeroed in on a bad tooth. Even if every detail of the story she told about Marco’s death and her place in it and her feelings about it were true—even if there was not one syllable of self-justification in the story—the fact was that she had somehow fallen into telling it over and over. She had turned it into a story. And then she had made that story into the core of her identity.
How had a man as self-absorbed as Erno managed to see this when so many who knew her better had not? He looked a fool, half crouched against the wall as if he expected it to whisper in his ear.
“What are you doing?” Mira asked.
He still wouldn’t face her. “I can feel things. This hand has a kind of neurological sonar. There’s a room beyond this wall, a big one.”
He stood straight, and finally managed the nerve to turn to her. His expression was grim. “We can go now.”
She closed and locked the fusion lab. When they reached the exit to the Materials complex he broke the uncomfortable silence. “I’m sorry for what I said. I had no right.” His long blond hair fell over his forehead, and she remembered it brushing her face as she kissed him.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“Please don’t tell any one else I was here.”
There it was again—his self-interest.
But she told him yes, and in silence he left.
Instead of going home, Mira went back to her desk and sat brooding. She thought about the hearing. After it was over everyone in the room—not just Carey and Hypatia, but Eva and Roz and the three judges—had looked at her sideways, as if she were an explosive device whose trigger they did not know. She took the ring from her pocket and played with it. Two vines wrapped around each other, circling to meet themselves, intertwined but never connected.
Eventually a pair of constables entered the office.
“What are you doing here?” the older one asked.
“Thinking.”
“Has anyone else been here?” The woman looked around the dimly lit room, the cubicles, the dark offices. “That SCOCOM rep—Erno Pamelasson?”
“No.”
The other, who had been watching Mira, spoke up. “You’re Mira Hannasdaughter,” she said. “You’re Looker.”
“Guilty as charged,” Mira said.
“Not yet,” said the older woman, “but soon.”
• • • • •
Uplifting a canine to human intelligence and preparing it to function in society is a complex and, even in the best of circumstances, brutal process, fraught with difficulties. It is by definition unnatural.
Among the interventions necessary to produce an uplifted dog are:
• Engineering of germ plasm
• Gestation in a surrogate mother; the increased skull size of the modified canine requires birth by cesarean
• Extensive biometric modification surgery
• Implanted AI and memory
• Endocrine alterations
• Laryngeal grafts
• Comprehensive behavior training
• Antisenescence and life extension drug therapy
To offer only one example of the difficulties uplifting presents: Despite continual improvements in techniques, the canine paw is ill suited for modification. By no extreme of surgery or augmentation have biotechnicians been able to produce anything resembling a simian hand on a canine. Uplifted dogs are thus dependent on mechanical devices, humans, or other simians to accomplish the simplest physical tasks.
The psychological effects of uplifting on the canine are less obvious but far reaching.
Normal puppies share everything, even the womb, with their siblings. In a litter, puppies pull ears, bite each other’s necks, tumble on top of each other, paw, push, lick. But an uplifted dog is, from gestation on, of necessity a singleton. Nothing the designer, breeder, developer, or teacher can do makes up for a lack of peer socialization. A puppy on the road to uplift may have contact with other dogs and uplifted animals, but she spends the bulk of her time in the presence of humans.
Socializing the uplifted dog is a difficult process, and solipsism an ever-present danger. Given the immense amount of attention she receives at every stage of her deve
lopment, the puppy perceives herself the center of the universe. She is not eager to share the stage with another creature.
Living in a world of yes, the uplifted puppy can lack bite inhibition and develop an exaggerated sensitivity to touch. At maturity such dogs exhibit boundless enthusiasm but no governor. They are unable to handle frustration or get out of trouble graciously. They may struggle with impulse control or be prone to violent reactions.
On the other hand, lacking littermates, the uplifted dog typically bonds unbreakably with his human parents and mentors. Behavioral training regimes modify and regulate the dog’s undesirable impulses and profitless habits. Countless stories attest to the uplifted canine as devoted companion and committed friend.
History celebrates the dog for its loyalty, obedience, and desire to please its master. But the uplifted canine mind, as various as the human mind, does not work as the human mind does. Given the vast range of its functions and malfunctions, the mind of the uplifted dog remains fundamentally mysterious.
• • • • •
The hotel suite’s dining table had become a second workspace for the SCOCOM team when they weren’t in the Diana Tower offices. Beason paged through another of the interviews the staff had taken, then pushed away his notebook. “This is useless. Let’s simply conclude the SoC is rotten top to bottom and let the Secretary General take it from there.” He stood up from the table. “She hasn’t got the backbone to ignore a negative report if her political future is at stake.”
“If you file such a report, I’ll go public,” Erno said. “You’re hunting for a casus belli.”
“Nobody will take you seriously,” Beason said. “You’re lucky we haven’t sent you home.”
I am home, Erno thought. But no: He had no home. For three days Göttsch had not let Erno out of the hotel. Erno occupied himself viewing interviews and drafting an analysis of the employment situation of male Cousins, waiting for Sirius to get him access to the tree genome stocks.
Mira’s accusation of fecklessness wore at him. It was none of his business what happened to the Society, but he could not help but feel he was betraying it by doing nothing. Yet he didn’t want to do anything. He just wanted to leave.