Fox raises his arm. He does the same.
Prodigal
GORD SELLAR
Dogs have been considered to be humanity’s “best friend” and most loyal companion for untold thousands of years, but, as the unsettling story that follows suggests, that may not be true for very much longer.
Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, grew up in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, and currently lives in South Korea with his wife and young son, where he teaches at a university. He graduated from Clarion West in 2006, and has subsequently made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Fantasy, and Tesseracts Twelve. In addition to writing, Sellar is a jazz saxophonist and a jazz buff, he has done screenplays for a few films that got produced, including South Korea’s first Lovecraft adaptation, and is working on a forthcoming anthology of Korean SF in English translation. His Web site is at www.gordsellar.com.
“He doesn’t look any different,” Jennifer commented, when we got home from the research facility, after Benji’s final sentientization treatment.
“He’s not supposed to yet, are you, boy?” I said, ruffling the hair on his head. He looked up at us from the tatty carpet with his big, curious terrier eyes, and I’d swear he smiled a little.
Technically, she was right. He didn’t really act very differently, not in any tangible way. Having recuperated from his surgeries and treatments, he still liked the same things: fetch-the-ball, chasing me around the backyard, going for a run—familiar pleasures. He’d still come and sit beside me as I watched TV in the evenings, content with a pat on the head or a scratch behind the ear when he caught me working. He was our good-natured consolation prize. Our gentle not-quite-a-child, a terrier puppy whose brain was developing massive neural connectivity day by day, the sparse woodland of his mind turning into a dense jungle, and whose mouth and throat had been cleverly sculpted into a system capable of expressing in speech those thoughts he’d already started having. I thought of it as this incredible gift, at the time, albeit a gift he hadn’t quite received yet. A miracle. He’d be a wonder-dog. That was why we’d called him Benji, after all.
But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see a change in him right from day one. It was something about his eyes. Something … well, just more than before. To me, it was unmistakable.
* * *
A few months later, we had some people over. It was the first party we’d had in half a year, mostly neighbors and coworkers, people like that. Some had heard about Ben, that he’d begun to talk finally. They expected some kind of demonstration. I’d warned him, hoping it would make him less nervous, but it had the opposite effect. He began to tap his front paws on the carpet, to shake his head a little like a wet puppy, his tail half-wagging. The first few people were folks who’d never come to a party at our place before, and Ben nervously avoided them.
Then Lorna arrived. A wannabe-painter friend of Jennifer’s, Lorna was familiar with Ben. She had played with him before the treatment, so he remembered her a little. As soon as her bulky shoulders passed through the doorframe, Benji barked excitedly. It had become a strange sound, no longer his own, no longer quite doglike, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He ran up to her and began sniffing at her feet. Ears perking up in recognition, he mumbled a distracted, “Hello,” before sticking his nose into her crotch for a sniff. Then he simply proclaimed, “Nice!”
“Oh my!” Lorna said, reaching down at him. “Now, Ben, you really mustn’t do that!” She forced his head down, pushing his face away from her, and said to me, “I thought they were supposed to be intelligent post-op?”
“I’m so sorry,” Jennifer said. “Tim, maybe you should take him upstairs?”
I nodded. “Come on, Benj,” I said, and tucked my hand under his collar. I led him to the bottom of the stairs, and he went up them obligingly. I followed him up and then said, “Left, Benji, left.” He followed the direction, and walked into our bedroom. “Good boy,” I said when we were both in, scratching behind his ear.
“Why?” he asked me, looking up curiously.
“Well, you’re not supposed to sniff people like that.”
“Sniff?”
“You know,” I said, and did my best impression of a dog sniffing.
“Oh. Nice sniff! Hello friend!”
“No, for dogs it’s a nice hello. For people, it’s rude,” I explained, while fishing a hide dog bone out of my sock drawer. I tossed it to him, and he caught it out of the air, but he didn’t chew it right away. Instead, he just set it down and stared at me as if he had some question he didn’t know how to phrase. After a while, he seemed to abandon the attempt, and as he chomped down on the bone, I quickly left the room, closing the door behind me. Before I went down to the party, I heard him pad toward the door, sigh loudly, and settle down onto the floor beside the door.
But that was what I’d always done with him at parties. It was nothing new. Except … it felt different now, doing that to him.
* * *
Watching Benji learn to speak was sometimes downright eerie.
It all happened so fast. From a wordless beast, he’d turned into a chatterbox in the space of a few months. They had implanted a neurochemical dispenser inside his skull, something that seeped the chemicals straight into his brain, wiring up a crazy new secondary network that not only made him smarter by the day, but also made him pick up language much faster than any human child.
Not that he spoke well. Even with his re-sculpted upper palate, some words were hard to pronounce. Which made him difficult to understand, and with no human body language to compensate for it. He was usually wide-eyed, his expression as inscrutable as any canine’s. If you’ve never known a sentient dog, it might sound crazy, but I swear Benji really did have expressions, though it took me years to learn to read them.
“What’s prrbrr?” he asked me one day, just when I got home from work. He was still stuck at excitedly muttering two-word sentences.
I squatted down close to the plastic door mat, scratched him behind the ear. “What’s that?”
“What’s pregmand?” he asked quietly, conspiratorially.
“Pregmand? You mean pregnant? It means, uh, that someone has a baby inside,” I said. “Like a mama dog, before the baby dog is born, she’s pregnant.”
“Oh,” Benji said, and began panting excitedly. “Really?” He blinked at me oddly, and padded off towards the creaky basement stairs, his tail wagging behind them. I suddenly started wondering whether Benji had gotten out and gotten a sentientized neighbor dog pregnant. We hadn’t gotten him neutered, I remembered with a groan. That was not going to be a fun conversation.
Of course, that wasn’t it at all. Benji just had incredible ears. He could hear phone conversations behind closed doors, arguments two houses away. No secret was safe with Benji around. But the penny only dropped a week later when Jennifer called me during one of my rare days down at the lab. It was just like her to pick that day to tell me.
“Tim?”
“Yes, honey,” I said into my cellphone, “Just a minute.” Glancing one last time at the ongoing statistical analysis for artificially accelerated lateral gene transfer, I flicked my monitor sourcing to the phone’s feed, and then full screened the videostream. She was sitting on the couch, wearing a pink T-shirt and dark blue sweatpants.
“What’s up, sweetie?”
“I have some news,” she said, looking slightly green around the gills, but smiling.
I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t, until I asked, “What is it?”
“Uh, well, honey. Remember how Dr. Flynn told us we’d never be able to have a baby?”
“Yeah…” I said, eyes widening.
“Turns out she was wrong.”
“You’re … pregnant?” I had to make sure.
She nodded at me, a brilliant smile widening on her face.
Benji padded into view, beside her, and looked at her carefully. “Pregnend make baby?”
“Yes, Benji. Mommy’s making a baby. You know wha
t that means right, Benji?” she asked him. He stared at her silently, not answering. He hadn’t yet figured out how to answer tag questions like that. “You’re going to have a little brother or sister.” She turned and winked at me, and said, “What do you think of that, Big Daddy?”
“Woo!” I yelled, and then I said, “I love you,” and she smiled at me.
“Baby!” Benji shouted, and his tail wagged, thump, thump, thump against couch so hard it made Jen laugh aloud.
* * *
Over the months that followed, Benji got more and more excited, just like us. One evening, after Jennifer had begun to show a little, he started in with questions during dinner.
He pulled his head out of his dog dish and turned to Jen: “Baby dish? Have dish?”
Jen smiled, and shook her head.
“Baby dish share,” he said, and wagged his tail.
Jennifer giggled, and said, “How cute,” and I laughed, and I patted him on the flank of his hind leg, as he turned back to the dish and devoured his dinner excitedly.
* * *
The night we brought Martin home, Benji met us at the door.
“Hi Benji,” Jennifer said.
“Hi Momma,” he said back. “Hi Daddy.” He looked at Martin, bundled in Jen’s arms. “Hi Baby.”
“The baby’s name is Martin,” I said, and then added, “You can call him Marty, if you like.” Benji had problems with pronouncing “in”, it tended to sound like “im”. It was some kind of tongue control thing, something that they hadn’t gotten quite right in his treatment.
“Mardy Baby,” Benji said softly, reverently. “Hi Mardy Baby,” he said, and then, “Come on, Baby. Baby bed.”
“What?” Jen asked, head tilted to one side, but Benji had already started off down the stairs into the cool basement. “Honey, I’m going to put Marty to bed. Can you, uh…”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, and waited for her to start up the stairs before I followed Benji down the creaking stairs to the basement. I found him wagging his tail, his nose nudging a spare plastic pad across the bare concrete floor, until it was next to his own. He liked to sleep down there because it was cool and quiet. The one he’d nudged into place was his old doggie bed, the one I should’ve thrown out months before when I bought his new one.
“Me Bed,” he said, and touched the old, tattered pad with one paw. Then he touched the nice new one and said, “Baby Bed. Mardy Baby Bed.”
I was a little stunned: Benji was sharing? I never expected that from a dog, and it made me smile. “Oh, that’s really sweet, Benji. But, uh, Marty’s not a dog. Baby boys don’t sleep in the basement. It’s too cold and dirty. But it’s so nice of you … You think of him as a brother, huh? Aw, good boy,” I said, patting him on the head. “Such a good boy.”
He sat beside the two pads, looked down at them, then up at me. “Baby Bed No?”
“Right, Benji. Baby Bed No.”
He drooped, tail slumped, and sunk to the concrete floor. Later, on hot summer nights when I found him sleeping beside Marty’s crib, I remembered him nosing the spare pad into place, and some weird guilty feeling would well up so fast I could barely drive it back down before having to examine it.
* * *
They played together so well, Benji and Marty, both of them scooting around the house on all fours. For a while, they really were like any two brothers. Benji would sniff Marty’s bottom occasionally and call Jen or me over: “Baby Mardy make poo!” Marty would push the buttons on a toy piano, and random songs would play. Benji would squeeze Tinky and Jiggy dolls between his teeth and they’d shout out greetings to Marty, provoking giggles and applause from that bright little blond toddler of ours. He always wanted to share his dinner with Marty, and his doggy biscuits, no matter how many times we explained that dog food and people food are different.
Benji really loved Marty, loved him as much as any brother would have. Somehow that made me forget all those awkward moments, the questions like, “Why Mardy Baby no tail?” and “Benji no birthday party?” and “Mardy Baby poo inside?” The time Benji tried to eat off the kitchen table, and sent our dinner crashing down by accident. Jen used to breastfeed Martin at the table, while she ate her own dinner sometimes, and Benji was perplexed by this, sometimes more than once a week. “Mardy Baby eats what? Benji too? Benji eat what too?”
“No, Benji,” Jennifer said. “You’re a dog. He’s a baby. Babies have milk, but dogs have dog food. This milk is not for you. It’s only for Marty, see?”
“No, Benji,” he repeated ruefully. He’d started repeating that phrase every time someone said it, even gently. It’s just the way everyone talks to dogs, isn’t it? When they jump up onto a guest, or try humping your leg?
“That’s right. Benji, no. Good boy,” I said. He lay down on the cool tile floor beside his bowl, and thumped his tail once, just once.
* * *
With a kid, the years pass so quickly you lose track. One day, you’re burping a baby; the next you have a little boy sitting beside you with a book in his lap, reading.
“… and … then … then the … the boy and his dog … went home…” Martin mumbled. I smiled. I’d mouthed the words along with him, but he’d done it all by himself.
“Good job!” I patted him softly on the back. “You got every word. Did you like the story?”
“Yup,” he said. “I wanna read it again,” he said.
“Okay, let’s…”
“No,” Marty insisted, shaking his head. “I want to read it with Benji.” He hopped down off the couch, onto the carpet and toward the dog.
Benji turned his head and said, “You … read with me?”
“Sure, Benj,” he replied.
“Okay,” Benji said, and he sat up. “You read, and I listen. Read slow.”
“Mmm hmm. Okay, page one,” Marty said carefully. “The story of Timmy and Spot,” he said, from memory. He knew the first few pages of the picturebook by heart. “‘There was a boy. His name was Timmy. There was a dog. Its name was Spot.’ Now you read.”
Benji said, “I can’t read. But I ’member: ‘There was boy. His name Timmy. There was dog. His name Spot.’”
Marty said, “Noooo, Benji. ‘There was a dog. Its name was Spot.’”
Benji blinked, stared at the page—at the picture, I suppose, since he wasn’t supposed to be able to read, not ever. “‘There was dog. Its name Spot.’”
“Good,” Marty said. “Now you’re gettin’ it.…”
* * *
Things started to go wrong around that time. The day that sticks out in my memory was this afternoon when I had some buddies over to watch the game on our new NetTV, while Jen and Marty were out someplace. Charlie, Deke, Demarco, and Peter were there, and we were all hollering at the screen. I don’t know when Benji came into the room, but when the ads came up, and Charlie and Deke hurried to the kitchen to get us all some cold beers, Ben tapped Peter on the leg with one paw.
“Oh, hey, Benji. How are you, boy?” Peter asked absently, the way anyone asks any dog, sentient or not. He patted Ben on the head for a few seconds.
“Okay. Question okay? Ask you?”
“Sure, Benji,” he grinned. He’d probably never met a dog as inquisitive as Benji—I never have. “What is it?”
“You Korean?”
“Well, I’m Korean-American, yeah.” I wondered how Benji had known that. Was it just a guess?
“Why Korean eat dog?”
Demarco and I both turned and looked at Peter, who sat there with one eyebrow raised. Demarco started to chuckle as Peter glanced at each of us before turning back to Benji. “Say what?”
Benji said the question again: “Why Korean eat dog?”
Peter looked up at me, puzzled. I shrugged and gave him a baffled look.
Demarco was doubled over now, laughing hysterically. “Racist dog!” he said, before bursting into laughter again. “That’s funny, man. They should put you on TV, Benji! The racist talking dog show!”
P
eter started laughing along. “Ha, I’d watch that show,” he said. Then he said, “Look, Benj, last time I visited Korea, I didn’t see any dog restaurants. All my relatives think eating dog is terrible. They say it’s mostly old guys who do it, and I never asked them why. So I dunno why anyone would eat dog. I guess they think it tastes good or something. But hey, nobody’s gonna eat you, ’kay?”
Benji blinked, processing this. “Dogs think people taste good too.”
Which … none of us knew what to say. We all sat there in silence, until Demarco sniffed and said, “Yeah, man, well, dogs think their own crap tastes good, right?”
“Sure,” Benji said, and we all burst out laughing as Deke and Charlie walked back into the room with the beers. But Benji just looked from one of us to the next, his eyes quite serious. Then the ads were done, and the announcer was talking about why Nick Lingonfelder wasn’t in the game this week, and whatever it was Benji wanted to say, he kept it to himself, and just went to the back door, muttering, “Can I go out?” as he passed me.
“Uh, sure, Benj,” I said, and went to open the back door. He went out without so much as a glance toward me. I remember thinking that wasn’t like him. When I went back into the living room, Demarco was telling Charlie and Deke about his idea for the TV show about Benji the Racist Dog.
I shrugged. “Yeah, guys, I have no idea where he picked that up. But you know, he’s young. You know how kids can be.”
“Kids?” Charlie mumbled, flopping onto the couch. “He’s a dog, Tim.” He handed me a beer.
I nodded. “He’s … yeah, he’s a souped-up dog, though.”
“Mmmm, souped-up dog … tasty,” Deke said, and Demarco burst out laughing again.
Peter chucked a sofa cushion at him, grinning. “You better talk to him, though,” he said. “Some people I know would take that shit the wrong way.”
* * *
That evening, I found Jen and Benji in the kitchen, talking. Benji’s head was lowered, the way he did when we caught him breaking the house rules.
“No, Benji, it’s okay,” Jen said, patting him on the head. “It’s an understandable question. But … well, you know how some dogs bite people? But not all dogs, right? Not all dogs are the same, right? It’s the same with people. Not all people of the same kind are the same.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 17