Julia and Dan quickly finished their drinks, said “Work to do,” and left. When the others had full cups from the dispenser on the wall, Nickers showed them more bays, each of these containing a pregnant or nursing truck. Most showed their bulldog ancestry very clearly in their flattened faces. A few had a more wolfish appearance. “Husky stock,” said Nickers. “For the far north.” In each case, the trucks’ collar ornaments had been removed and hung from hooks on the walls.
Jimmy was pouring the last of his coffee into his mouth, thinking that it was a poor substitute for honeysuckle wine, when a sudden shout broke the quiet of the ward: “Get the tractor! Hurry!”
“Come on!” Nickers cried, throwing his empty cup into the nearest waste basket. “Here’s something most visitors don’t get to see.” They ran behind him to the bay at the far end of the barn and crowded together to peer through the glass. “Look at that big mother! That’s our vet.” Nickers pointed at a small woman in a white coat who was leaning over a truck whose sides, swollen until she looked more like an Army tank than an oversized, civilian dog, heaved with the convulsions of labor. The truck’s panting breaths echoed in the bay.
The great door at the end of the bay was creaking upward. As soon as there was room, an old, gasoline-powered farm tractor roared in, and a coveralled young man jumped off its seat.
“Chains!” cried the vet, and her assistant unwound heavy steel chains from the rear of the tractor and handed them to her.
Nickers explained: “It’s a hard birth. With cattle, a come-along will do, but that just isn’t powerful enough for a truck.”
The vet was up to her shoulders in the truck’s birth canal, doing something with the chains. When she was done, she screamed at her assistant, “Get that thing turned around!” When he had obeyed, she attached the chains to a tie-ring behind the seat and screamed again: “Move!”
The engine roared, the chains grew taut, and there was a sucking sound as the newborn pup emerged into the world. The tractor stopped, the chains went slack, and the vet tenderly removed them from the infant truck. It was three times the size of an adult, unmodified Saint Bernard, but naked, wet, and blind. The mother extended one paw to rake it in close to her side, where it began to nuzzle while she licked it clean.
Nickers sighed with relief. “They’ll both be all right.” A moment later, he said, “Look. The next one’s coming on its own.” Jimmy watched, and the tender smile on the vet’s face brought an answering smile to his own, even as his fist clenched in sympathy with the laboring mother and his nails drove into his palms. The vet obviously loved her giant charges, just as he had loved the mongrel bitch the Branes had once owned. Her name had been Ruffles. It had been the high point of his tenth year when she had had pups. But then they had had her spayed. She had disappeared when he was twelve.
“You’ll love the next barn.”
“What is it?” asked Jimmy.
But Nickers said nothing more, even when they stood outside their next stop. Instead, he simply opened the door, stood aside, and said, “We clean up every morning, but.…”
Jimmy and his Dad both choked when the thick, pervasive odor hit them. Nickers only shrugged and smiled; he was used to it. It took a moment, but in the way of noses, Jimmy’s soon stopped protesting, and he was able to step through the door.
This barn was not divided into bays. The door Nickers held open let them into a small chamber whose walls had been welded together from inch-thick steel bars. It reminded Jimmy of nothing so much as a shark cage, the kind used to protect tourists who want close looks at man-eaters. Similar cages enclosed the barn’s other doors. Between the cages, the barn was one cavernous room.
That room held at least fifty short-legged bulldog puppies. They ran in circles. They rolled. They yipped. They tumbled in fuzzy balls. They chewed on each other and old tires and logs. They lapped water that bubbled up in a concrete basin. They sniffed assiduously in the corners of three food troughs that might each have held a whole Armadon. Some even slept, curled up wherever the hay that littered the floor had been swept by ceaseless motion into piles.
Jimmy did not truly appreciate the size of the puppies until they reacted to the presence of the three men in the entry cage. Then, as they all stopped running, rolling, yipping, tumbling, chewing, lapping, sniffing, and sleeping and thundered toward the steel bars, he realized the truth: Every one of those puppies was the size of an old-fashioned pickup truck.
Nickers shouted, “Down!” The pups sat quietly just outside the bars. They did not whine or growl or prance. Their tongues, the size of bedsheets, lolled. Their short tails hammered cheerfully on the concrete floor. Nickers unlatched a gate on the inner wall of the cage and indicated that Jimmy and his Dad should go through. “They’ll behave,” he said. “Just watch your step.”
“How do you ever housebreak them?” asked Dad.
“We don’t. They’re too big to come in the house, and outdoors there’s usually a litterbug around.”
Jimmy was paying no attention to the pragmatic conversation behind him. Nor was he thinking of honeysuckle wine, or of lost friends. He was stepping through the gate into the midst of the puppy throng, staring, reaching, petting, finding that their coats were much rougher than he had expected, but.… They were white, black, brown, spotted, cute and ugly, large and larger. He focused on one that reminded him of a dog he had once seen in an old, old movie: it was a dark brindle, with a single white circle around one eye. “You’re Tige,” he said, and he faced it, eye to barrel-sized eye, nose to wind-tunnel nose, and held out a hand for it to sniff.
Tige’s mouth opened, and the immense tongue soaked the boy from foot to head.
Jimmy’s fate was sealed.
* * * *
“Yes,” said Nickers later. “I’m a recruiter. And the pups are my best tool.” They were in a small room in the farm’s office building. The soft lighting was focused on Nickers’ polished desk, though Nickers sat on a low couch against the wall. Jimmy and his Dad faced him from comfortable armchairs across a coffee table bearing a single pristine sheaf of papers. All three once more had cups of coffee in their hands. “We put the word out, and parents bring kids who don’t know what to do with their lives. We give ’em the four-bit tour, and then we let the pups do their best. Which is pretty good.”
Jimmy was wearing a Daisy Hill Truck Farm coverall. His own clothes were tumbling in a dryer somewhere on the premises. Now he said, “So what’ll it cost me to get Tige?”
“Not a nickle,” said Nickers. He grinned and slapped one knee with a hand. “We don’t sell the pups.”
Jimmy’s face fell.
“I don’t recruit customers,” he added. “But truckers. If you wish, you move into the dorm upstairs over the puppy barn, and we train you while the pup—Tige—grows up. You work around the farm—you met Julia and Dan—and help train Tige. Then you work for us as a trucker. Driving Tige. And in ten years, Tige is all yours.”
Jimmy was silent, thinking that the deal sounded reasonable enough. He reached for the papers on the coffee table. The top one was a contract. The others were informational, telling him the rules of the establishment, what he should bring with him, where the nearest shopping areas and public transportation stops were.
“One thing,” said Nickers. “Your father’s told me about the honey.” He shook his head. “We tolerate none of that here. No drugs of any kind.”
Somehow, Jimmy was not surprised. It fitted what he had thought about why his Dad had brought him here, and what he had seen—or failed to see—on the grounds. But the thought no longer bothered him. Tige had already begun to fill the void in his heart. He reached for the contract.
Nickers stopped him. “Not so fast. Take it with you, and think it over. For now.…” He rose and opened the office door. “Alex?” He turned back to Jimmy. “Another trainee. He’ll ge
t you your clothes. They should be dry by now. And you can keep the coverall.”
* * * *
“Those puppies,” said Jimmy. “Do you remember Ruffles?” The farm’s contract and other papers were on the kitchen table. The coverall was draped over a chair so the shoulder patch logo showed clearly.
“But they’re so huge!” cried his mother. The whole family was sitting around the table. Jimmy’s head was bent, his hands clasped before him, his voice soft. The others’ eyes shifted constantly from the coverall to Jimmy to the contract, and back again.
“Yeah!” said Caleb. “Though I’d rather have a Roadrunner.”
“If I drive Tige for just ten years, he’ll be all mine.” He was thinking the farm’s deal over, he was, though he didn’t expect the process to make much difference. Puppies and their all-forgiving, all-compensating love were not just for little kids, and if he had to become a trucker to get Tige, he would.
“And what then? How will you feed him?”
“I’ll have to stay a trucker, won’t I?”
“A Mack that big is no pet.”
And Jimmy thought: Was puppy love no more than a trap, a lure for a vocation that would forevermore have him hustling to feed the pup, as well as himself, and eventually a family? Nickers had said as much, hadn’t he?
“You won’t be able to vege out on honeysuckle wine,” said Caleb. There was a touch of “nyahh-nyahh” whine in his voice, but Jimmy ignored it. Nickers had said that, too, and though his head still ached and somewhere deep inside him lurked a craving for the honey, he thought he could handle it. He was not, after all, addicted to the stuff. He liked it, he wanted it, but it did not rule him the way it did the honey-bums he had seen under the highway overpasses.
Jimmy reached for the contract, drew it closer, and paused. He looked within himself for the honey craving, and he measured it against his craving for Tige, for maturity, for life.
He straightened his back and looked at his Dad, sitting across the table. His mother noticed and began to cry.
“Got a pen, Dad?”
His father quietly drew a pen from his shirt pocket and, his own eyes glistening, held it out.
MATCHMAKER
We like to think we rule our dogs…
“Sit!” said Jimmy Brane. His dog’s ears stiffened. The animal’s eyes were bright and attentive, but his bulldog face was as blankly devoted as ever.
“You don’t have the faintest idea of what I want, do you?” He walked behind Tige, tapped the gengineered animal’s haunch, and said “Sit!” again. Nothing happened.
Finally, he squatted in front of the dog, sitting on his heels, his eyes on a level with the chrome model of an old eighteen-wheeler that hung from the dog’s collar. His arms extended down between his knees. “Sit!”
Tige’s mouth snapped shut. The ears tipped forward. He seemed—could it be? Jimmy wondered—to be saying, “So that’s what you want!” And then, indeed, he lowered his rear to the ground.
“Is that all it takes?” asked Jimmy, still squatting, looking up at the dog. Tige was a young Mack just a little larger than an old-fashioned pickup truck. His hide was a dark brindle, with a single white circle around one eye. And he apparently was so smart that all one had to do was show him what one wanted, and he would understand, and obey.
“Shake hands?” he said, his voice uncontrollably tentative. He lifted one hand himself and watched, disbelieving, as Tige did the same. He leaped to his feet and seized the paw. “Shake hands!”
“Good boy!” he said then, and after a few minutes of watching Tige race around the field, he again tried, “Sit!” Tige obeyed immediately, and he showed as well that he remembered his second lesson. Jimmy seized the proffered paw delightedly and laughed aloud.
Now! he thought, and “Now!” he said out loud. Maybe he had something that would catch black-haired Julie’s eye and make her pay attention. Julia Templeton—Julie—who was a year ahead of him in the training program and resolutely ignored every attempt he made to chat. Julie who surely would never, never look at him, or consent to a date, or.…
* * * *
Teaching one’s truck tricks just wasn’t done. Jimmy had therefore deliberately chosen to begin Tige’s training in the most remote of the Daisy Hill Truck Farm’s many fields. If he had been nearer to the Farm’s barns and dorms, he might have been seen by his fellow trainees. He would also have been able to see the white fences that surrounded the nearer pastures, and he might have remembered the cattle the Farm raised to provide the growing trucks with milk and meat.
Now, sitting obediently on the floor of his stall, stinking as only five tons of dripping wet dog can stink, Tige grinned doggily at his master. His stubby tail thumped cheerfully on the concrete.
“Litterhead!” said Jimmy. To one side of the stall rested a litterbug, a shovel-jawed genimal of porcine stock. Its task was to clean up manure and other rubbish. Unfortunately, litterbugs did not patrol the pastures.
“Litterhead!” Jimmy’s face was directed upward, exposed to the rank gusts of dogbreath. One hand was wrapped around a massive canine and tugging, as if he could shake the Mack’s head back and forth. “It wasn’t enough to run, was it? You had to roll. And you had to do it where the cows…” Jimmy had had to walk the Mack back to the barn—he had been too filthy to ride—and then to hose him down before returning him to his stall. He had missed breakfast, and now he was late for class.
And it was his own mechin’ fault. He shouldn’t have been thinking of impressing Julie.
He peered down at himself. His light brown coveralls, the shoulders marked with patches bearing the farm’s distinctive logo, a black-eared white beagle, were wet but not dirty. And the wet would dry; he needn’t change. With a sigh, he opened a bin mounted on the wall, withdrew a biscuit the size of a football, and tossed it to Tige. Then he rummaged until he found a crumb a little larger than his fist, gnawed loose a chunk, grimaced, told himself that it was better than no breakfast at all, closed the stall’s outer door, and left.
* * * *
“Where have you been, Mr. Brane?” Jimmy froze, bent over the back-of-the-room seat into which he had been about to slip. His fellow trainee truckers looked at him and grinned. The instructor was glaring.
“Cleaning up Tige, Ms. Garland. I walked him in a cow pasture by mistake.”
When the laughter subsided, Ms. Garland—Betsy to the staff members, he knew, but not to him, not to any trainee—leaned toward him, away from the chalkboard. She was a woman of distinctive shape, three times as large below as she was above, given to tent-like skirts and tight blouses, with the head of a blonde cherub atop it all. “I presume you did your reading last night. Tell us, Mr. Brane, why we bother to plug computers into the Macks’ brains.”
He straightened. He was not one to neglect his studies. “Yes, ma’am. It’s so we can have total control of their movements on the road. But.…”
“But what?”
“Isn’t that kind of control unnecessary, Ms. Garland? It seems to be a hangover from when trucks were just machines.”
“And now they’re alive? And for centuries, dogs have been taught sheep-herding, tracking, retrieving, and dozens of other useful tricks? So all we have to do is train them to obey voice commands, or gestures, or reins, and that will do?” She sighed as if she had heard it all before, as of course she had. Now she scanned the class. “Mr. Higgins. Why can’t we rely on obedience?”
Alec Higgins, a rangy red-head whom Jimmy considered one of his few friends at the farm, said, “They might not obey. They could decide to chase something, or go after a bitch in heat.”
“Not that.” Their instructor was shaking her head. “The Bioform Regulatory Administration insisted that the gengineers remove that particular instinct. If they hadn’t, even the computers might not be enough. But chasin
g, yes. Or attempts to socialize with other trucks on the road. You can imagine the traffic jams. And that’s what made the BRA require rigid controls before letting Macks go into general use.”
“But can’t computers go wrong? What about sabotage?”
Ms. Garland nodded. “It’s been done, yes. Virus programs, and sabotaged chips. But that only led to new designs that are virtually impossible to subvert.”
Tonya Metz, dark of both hair and skin, slim, and easily outraged, spoke before her upraised hand could be recognized. “But it’s slavery! As soon as they’re big enough to go on the road, we turn them into machines, nothing more than masses of muscle and nerves and control circuits. And.…”
Ms. Garland nodded once more. “You’re quite right. The Macks have much more intelligence than we let them use.” She waited out the storm of approval from her students who daily lived with, trained, and loved their young Macks. “But that’s the law, even though we may think it’s unnecessary. The Macks have to have their freedom at the same time we do—in our off hours.”
* * * *
It would be two more years before Tige was big enough and strong enough to haul the great cargo trailers on the interstate greenways. Until then, Jimmy’s days would continue to be filled with classes. He would learn computer operation, rules of the road, trucking history, even something of the gengineering that had created the trucks and other bioforms, and of the skeletal reinforcements that made it possible for them to carry their immense weight. He would learn how to care for his Mack, to watch his nutrition, to groom him and clean him, to notice and tend and prevent muscle strains and other ailments.
He would even train Tige, under guidance, teaching him to accept loads such as the control and cargo pod that would be strapped to his back and the trailer he would drag behind for larger loads. Perhaps most important of all, he would teach Tige to submit when the computer was plugged into the socket in the back of his skull. The machine would then override virtually all influence of Tige’s will, making him a prisoner within his own skull. It would take a great deal of time and patience and love before Tige would have the necessary faith that control would return, that submission was only temporary, that in any case the abnegation of self was what his master demanded and deserved and that it was therefore right.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 10