Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Now I was going away. Seeing it all from the other side.

  * * * *

  “We have to take her to the pound!” Arnold's voice was reedy when it rose. “She's ruined the rug. It's a very good rug, isn't it?” He sounded hopeful.

  I was sitting rather far away, in the living room, half-behind a chair, trying to be small. Elizabeth was on her knees with some cleaner and paper towels. It was her grandmother's Oriental rug. “It's all right.”

  “I don't think so.”

  She looked up at him and said sharply, “It's my rug, Arnold, and it's all right.”

  A thrill shot through me.

  * * * *

  I have two brains. My human brain is evenly distributed throughout my dog body, intertwined with everything else. It makes what we call thinking slow, since distances to be traveled are greater. This was a decision I made. I wanted to be able to control my body easily, and therefore the dog brain needed to be where it has been for hundreds of thousands of years. The dog brain is on tap. It is ready.

  But where was I? What was I?

  I was a religious experience. I was, and am, Awe of Elizabeth. I was able to lie next to her on the bed, feel her hand absently play with my fur as she read, which is something that my human self would never have felt again. I was, I am, the future I never would have had, I am life beyond death.

  After a weak, “I don't want that dog in the bed,” Arnold succumbed. “You don't want the dog in the bed, but I do,” she replied, calmly, firmly, and leaving him with no doubt about his choices.

  * * * *

  We are in that heaven that all the saints so longed for and predicted, pens scritching across rough vellum in damp towers, heads bent beneath sputtering candles. Heat, ample light, plenty, near-infinite knowing. But man is still enemy to himself, and man still must find god within himself to go beyond the oppression; the killing. And first, he must find killing wrong. That seems to be a sticking point in some parts. What if, suddenly, we all simply could not kill. If it was impossible. Memory drugs might do this.

  I left my grad students with a particular prototype. If everyone had it, if it became active all at once, all wars, all firing, all missiles, would stop. Men in bars, poised to cut during the Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club boys’ night out would drop their knives. Women in the Air Force with a load of cluster bombs would overfly without pressing the button. Any death would be accidental, not intentional. No revenge.

  How would we pass our time? How would we spend our money?

  Oh, there were a million problems with this drug, no probability that it would be brought to production in my lifetime. It was just a dream, and there was just one dose, one infinitely expandable dose, which had never been tested. I distilled it into pure smack-quality intensity and kept it, then handed the information over to Juanita, the brightest and best, the most committed, the most feisty, the one who could muster the most money. The most likely to succeed.

  I did have a plan ... what was it?

  The memory key. Yes. That's it. My dog self sometimes forgets.

  When I remember Juanita, I feel hopeful. Glad.

  But I am a dog. Gladness is my nature.

  * * * *

  I found that I could read.

  At first, it was slow going. Elizabeth had left the newspaper on the floor, open to the Sunday funnies. I tried lying down on top of the paper and looking at it between my paws, but I had to back up, and finally I stood and looked down at it. This was especially painful. I imagine that stroke patients might feel this way—the loss of an especially treasured skill.

  But then, it came together! A sharp bark! I danced! It was just the brain-slowness, the long journey of the information—

  “Look,” said Arnold. “You'd think that silly dog could read.”

  Elizabeth glanced over and looked at me very thoughtfully. I reached down with my head, grasped the edge of the dry newspaper in my teeth, held the page down with my paw, and tore it in half. I am just a silly dog. What is printed on the paper means nothing to me.

  “No!” she said, jumping up and grabbing the newspaper.

  But she continued to look at me thoughtfully just the same.

  Well, I no longer had to worry about such things. I was a dog.

  * * * *

  Wendy, still, was everywhere in the house. I ran through it every morning as if a spell struck me; I sniffed frantically, disconsolate, while Arnold worked, composing his dangerous, seditious smacks, which said that the government had been subverted by evil men and that we must all take action. His smacks were, and are, full of specificity; his research was superb. I know; I was quite aware of him before Wendy died; he was Elizabeth's colleague. Her smacks were quieter, but smoothly ferocious, with sharp, sudden legal barbs, like those of sea creatures, emerging to puncture arguments and positions. They really were two of a kind.

  Occasionally he said lie down and be quiet, but didn't move from his chair, or even move his eyes from his screen.

  That particular morning, Elizabeth was out, teaching. The house, with pale winter sunlight striping the dark wood floor, seemed empty; Arnold was invisible to me. I sensed that things were no longer all that good between Arnold and Elizabeth, but I didn't care. I was deeply happy just to be near her.

  In the afternoon, I jumped up on Wendy's bed, took Rumble gently in my jaws, and stretched out, aching. Arnold came to the doorway and looked at me.

  “You shit,” he said. “You think I don't know what's possible? I'm working on it.” As he walked away, shaking his head, he muttered, “But sometimes a dog is just a dog. Right? Right? Of course.”

  I'm a dog, I barked. I'm a dog, dog, dog.

  “Shut up,” he yelled, and went back into his office.

  * * * *

  A few hours later, I heard him shout “God damn it!” He staggered from his office and leaned against the doorframe of Wendy's room. I rolled my eyes to look at him. He let loose with a sob, dropped his head into his hands, reeled, and walked away.

  I ran to his side, curious, a dog, overwhelmed by his scent. His pure, political goodness engulfed me. How did this smell? Oddly, like the ocean. Several kinds of sea. An openness. This apparently did not translate into personal openness—he was jealous of a dog, and that stunk—but he was famous for this sea-goodness, and for the sheer efficaciousness of his sea-wrath, a pounding ceaseless wave of good sense he released daily from relayed locations, helping to keep people open-minded. In a world where we could choose to become dogs, we could quite easily be made into dogs without choosing. Right?

  Right. And that was just a small taste of the nasty possibilities. So he was quite necessary.

  He also emanated the scent of something-bad-has-happened: worry, defeat, fear.

  I returned to the bed, jumped onto it, and bit down tightly on Rumble.

  * * * *

  Elizabeth came home flushed and angry. “You wouldn't believe what they've done!” She slammed the door behind her.

  I dashed to her, danced around—carefully, so carefully, not jumping up. She crouched down, hugged me. She was crying. “They let me go! Fired me! I have tenure, but ... Oh, hell!”

  Then Arnold was there pulling her away, up, giving her a long, tall hug, saying, “I know, honey, I know. Look, we have to get out of here. I've been packing. It's my fault. It's me.”

  After I crawled onto Wendy's bed, I rested my head on Rumble, who was very damp.

  It was not Elizabeth's fault. It was not Arnold's fault. Every bad thing in the world was my fault. My memory fault. My memory addiction fault.

  But I would fix it.

  * * * *

  Outside, the sky was raining hate. Small pictures of Arnold descended and popped, and neighborhood kids led the police to our house and they dragged him away. I realized that he had been in hiding. There would have been better places.

  Elizabeth was magnificent, promising many specific forms of legal action, even when they threatened her too.

  They did not t
ake Elizabeth, which, I think, made her more angry. They only took Arnold, said that he was a traitor and that they did not need any further legal justification for taking him. They shoved him in a truck that had a government insignia on it and that was that.

  We stood on the wintry stoop. The gray sky backgrounded darker gray trees, and the mundane houses of the neighborhoods, their yards yellow and brown, seemed the saddest place in the world.

  My dogness kept back the surging memory of seeing Wendy lying on the street on a similar day. I was that strong, that much dog, my humanness, my Mikeness, firmly tamped into my paws, the tip of my tail, my entrails. And I knew what she was thinking: Loss. Nothing but loss.

  She collapsed onto the stoop, put her head in her hands, and cried. I pressed next to her, licked her salty tears. She put her arm around me.

  I was sad for her. I was glad of the moment; deeply satisfied, and some yearning was settled, for just that tipping instant. Finally, I could be of some use to her, if only as a furry animal into which she could press her face, and sob, and hug me so tightly that my entire being rejoiced.

  * * * *

  They were watching Elizabeth, of course, her information paths, with their computers, but she knew the triggers as she had defended clients against their prying. Besides, they have so many people to watch. She knew the back alleys to the back alleys, all the ways to make her searches innocuous, all the ways to subvert their attempts. And she found out where they took Arnold.

  She talked to me, of course, all the time, told me everything she did and everything she planned to do. She forgot to eat, and became very thin, and ran twice a day, with me at her side, and got strong.

  By that time, I knew that Arnold would never die, not for her. “He left an entire library of smacks,” she said. “These people are so predictable. He said that tyrants always are. I'll only have to modify each one a bit to make it perfectly up-to-date when I release it.”

  They will know you are doing it, I barked. I barked straight at her, standing up, as if I were talking to her. I heard each word in my head as I barked. I thought of plans. I could tear out tiny newspaper words and assemble them for her. I could talk to her if I really wanted to.

  No. Mike could talk to her. I knew quite well that she would throw Mike out of the house, onto the street. She would never let Mike back in. She really could not suspect who I was. She was already puzzled at times.

  She leaned back in her computer chair, tired and anxious. “They'll know it's me, of course. If they take me, I'll be of no use. But if I do nothing, I'm of goddamn little use either. Hell.”

  For three days, then, she packed. She went into the garage and got out all of our old camping and backpacking gear, our emergency flee-the-government food about which we laughed, but nervously, when we assembled it years ago. The smells of it all threw me into ecstasies of a million hikes. One year, we hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. When we started in Georgia, in the spring, red trilliums dotted the slopes of the mountains. Our tent smelled of Gore-Tex, a few steps removed from plastic, and as she unrolled it and set it up in the garage to see if it was still good I went inside, breathed deeply, and, if I could have, I would have cried. I curled up there on the sleeping bags she tossed into the door, enveloped in a deeply scented panacea of the past. The good times. Us.

  “I know where he is,” she said. “And the government is going down. It will be chaos. He won't be at all useful; he'll be killed. Here's the plan. Listening? Good dog. I've got an aunt with a cabin in the north Georgia mountains. Her name is Cecile. She's very old, hasn't gone there for years. But first, we have to get him.”

  Why? I thought. We don't need him. My traitor tail, though, thumped in agreement, ringing against a Coleman stove she'd shoved inside.

  I wanted all of her, everything, just like I had when we'd met. I wanted that still, her first wagon ride, the day she'd fallen from the monkey bars and broken her arm, the feeling she'd had when she launched from Cove Mountain, into the wind, her arms in the hang gliding loops, moving the bar. When we met, we'd talked and talked, trying to get to that place where we would be one, the same person.

  * * * *

  Where does memory reside? We do not know. It is a system, a process, a constant recreation. What accounts, then, for its specificity? I'd transfused blood from one white mouse to another, after giving them the memory drug. I watched the new mouse run the maze, which it had never before run, perfectly. Strange but true. All that information, so compact, just needing the medium into which to expand.

  I was that medium, now. I was like water. Elizabeth and Jolly and Wendy were the folded Japanese paper flower that would unfold inside me.

  * * * *

  She packed the truck, tied down everything beneath a tarp. The back seat of the truck was full of electrical equipment which might soon be useless. Cecile had a generator, and a huge buried propane tank, and when that was gone, that would be it.

  Elizabeth took all the money she had in the bank, all the jewelry, odd things she thought might be useful for barter. One night she went next door and traded Mr. Monroe's license plates for ours. “He'll never notice,” she said, bolting them onto the truck. She was ready to go get Arnold and head for the hills.

  Inside the hollow garage, sounds were magnified. I heard the car come up the street and jumped to my feet. It was three in the morning.

  “What is it, girl?” and then she froze too. “Shhhh.” She held me tightly, and then held my mouth shut, too.

  Footsteps, coming up the walk. A thump.

  The car sounds receded down the street.

  She hurried through the dark house, opened the front door.

  It was Arnold, tossed like a package onto the doorstep. He was naked, bloody, bruised, curled up, moaning.

  “Oh, no!” She tried to pick him up, but he was too heavy. She pulled him onto the hall rug, slammed the door. “Arnold! Arnold!”

  He opened his eyes. They were empty. Except for the tears.

  * * * *

  She had her mother's wheelchair and walker and all kinds of old folk equipment in the attic. She worked quickly, fury in every motion. From taking care of her mother, she knew how to position him, how to hoist him into the truck. When she was finished, his clothes were packed, he was wearing a diaper, wheelchair and walker were in the back of the truck. He stared straight ahead.

  The last thing she put in the truck was Rumble. Slowly; sadly, almost as if she wanted to leave Rumble, leave Wendy, behind. She sighed and locked the house door. She said, “Come on, girl.” I jumped into the truck, between her and Arnold, and sat up so I could see where we were going.

  Everything seemed in order outside. The fast food chains were doing a brisk business; the parking lots at grocery stores were crowded, like before a blizzard, but there was no hysteria. Perhaps no one really understood how long this might last. It was a government coup—them against us. It was spreading, as if a virus had engulfed the entire world. Maybe it had, spread by Allover.

  After we had driven for most of the day, she pulled off a narrow country road and lifted a portable podcaster from the back seat, tucked it beneath her arm. She thrashed through the woods for a few minutes, found a flat rock, set it up, and turned it on.

  It is a magnetic thing, the podding; the smacks. It is a precise frequency, except that it is constantly changing in order to elude the government, and you swallow it, and it disseminates into your cells and stays there for a while. That's all. You are an antenna, constantly conducting a blisteringly fast search, and you get Arnold's new smack. Or whoever's. Arnold's, as I said, was by far the pill most swallowed. Internationally. He was the most true, most courageous. Most energetic.

  The most dangerous.

  This setup would just help disguise the source.

  She stood up straight and dusted off her hands. “There. They'll find it pretty soon—maybe. If they have time. It's kind of like a chain of bubbles, though. One will release several, and those will release several. Ti
me-delayed. Some for years. Mike and I went to Czechoslovakia right after it was returned to independence, in 1989. There was a museum exhibit there of all of the lost years, the years during which they'd been allowed no news. It was called Lest We Forget. Well, this is my Lest We Forget.”

  My laugh, and my tears, were just a bark.

  * * * *

  A slight snow spits outside the cabin. Elizabeth has made it cozy and warm for Arnold. It is too hot for me, but I would rather stay in here with people than go outside and be comfortable. I am a dog.

  I lie on the couch so I can look over Elizabeth's shoulder while she works. She is in touch with a hacker.

  “I think he's in the Netherlands,” she says to Arnold. “His name is The Great and Powerful U. You, get it? All of us; one of us. But maybe U is a woman.” She takes a sip of coffee and resumes her work.

  All the hackers want to figure out a universal hack that will leave us bare to one strong message, one big smack. But what will that message be? Most hackers don't really care. They just want to open everything up. For them, it's a game, a challenge. For most people, it's the ultimate fear: mind control.

  But U seems to be addicted to Arnold's smacks. She believes in him, in his messages of the importance of truth and transparency. Every day, U posts, somewhere, about the latest smack that Elizabeth has brought up-to-date and released.

  What is the truth? I know what the truth is. Truth is loss, death, grief, and pain, and knowing the preciousness of each individual. Truth is living always on that edge. Truth is trying to prevent all that from happening. Humans have a special way of forgetting truth, of not thinking about what others might feel. Have I said it? Memory is physical.

  Knowing can be changed.

  I slowly lick the white top of my paw, straighten the curly fur into smooth lines, feel with my tongue the smack-bump inside. It is just a tiny bump, but it is powerful. It contains the essence of what I distilled in the lab.