Amis, Martin - Einstein's Monsters (v1.0)

by Einstein's Monsters(Lit)

  Transfigured, she climbed from the caressing water and knelt on the bank to warm her body in the sun. Edging forward an inch or two, a foot, a yard, the puppy kept his vigil, sighing, wincing, smacking his jaws in sleepy fever. For he was by now a rather sick little puppy—bruised and pining, quite starved of the detailed tenderness that every little puppy needs. And this morning he lay there doubly traumatized by fear and relief. Violent events had forced him actually to skip the assignation of the previous day; and, in the little puppy's drowsy world of cause and effect, he believed that if he failed to appear at the nervous creek then, well, the loved one would fail to appear also, would never reappear, would disappear forever. Hence his shock of relief, his seizure of consolation, when he peered out from the secretive shadows and saw her there once more.

  It happened the night before the night before. It happened like this. The little puppy was soundly sleeping in his usual place (a sheltered hollow by a leaning tree) and in his usual posture (one of utter abandonment), when a flurry of sounds and smells suddenly wrestled him to his feet. Frowning, the little puppy registered curious stirrings in the texture of the earth, and sensed faint splittings and crashings, drawing nearer. The scent, still diluted by distance, keenly intrigued the puppy but also awakened in him the glands of danger. He hesitated, there in the changeable night. Too weak and confused to make a run for it, he eyed the burrow where he had recently spent a pleasant hour, sniffing and scratching and trying out a powerful new bark. Then the sounds were upon him: louder, worse, hot and toxic with limitless hunger. And still the little puppy hesitated, the head bending slightly in its trance, the tail twitching in a reflex of hope—of play. But now the gust of gas and blood swept over his coat: the little puppy slithered whimpering to the burrow and shouldered himself into the clinging damp. Or he tried. The locked front paws searched for purchase, yet that plump little rump of his was still exposed while the back legs skidded and thrashed. And now he could actually feel the torch of breath, the scalding saliva playing on his rear. Terror couldn't do it—but horror could. Horror gouged him into the earth with an audible pop; and he lay there coughing and weeping until the egregious rage had vented, had wrecked itself on the ground above his head. ... So shaken was the little puppy that he failed to emerge for a good thirty-six hours, and then only a famished despair had him backing toward the daylight. It wasn't easy getting into the burrow, but it was easy getting out. For the little puppy, it seemed, was getting littler all the time.

  And so he sighed and gazed, and gazed and sighed. The flowers had all lost their swoon and now arched and strained to meet the young girl's touch. Oh, how they longed to be picked. Light and naked she moved among them, leaning to free a stem from the earth, then straightening to fix the petals in her costly black hair. Loved by the little puppy (mutely, proudly—how many lifetimes would he not joyously spend, unrequited, unregarded, in this half-love, this half-life?), the young girl sang, the young girl swam, the young girl lay back on her dress, drying herself and dreaming of growth, of change, of mysterious metamorphoses. Humming, murmuring, she sought another sun-dazed shape in which to drowse, opened her eyes—and what should she see? Why, a little puppy, a very tentative little puppy, inching through the flowers, its tail anxiously shriveled, the hot nose brushing the grass. The puppy had had absolutely no intention of approaching the girl in this way. But then, the puppy just found that he'd gone ahead and done it—as little puppies will. The girl sat up and, with no waste of attention, stared at him strictly, a hand raised to her mouth. The little puppy, sensing the gravity of his error, was about to slink miserably away, to the ends of the earth, never to return—but then she laughed and said, "Hello. Who are you then? Come on. Come here. It's all right. Ooh, what a funny little creature you are. . . . I'd take you home with me. But they won't like you. Because of the dog. Keithette won't like you. I don't think Tom will either. My name is Andromeda. And I like you. Yes, I really do."

  All this of course was pure Greek to the little puppy— but who cared? Her voice, with its infant lilt and music, was just another vast extra in his ambient bower of bliss. Not in his dreams, in his wagging, whimpering dreams. . . . While it might be pushing it to say that little puppies have fantasies, it is certainly the case that they have sentiments, powerful ones too—down there, where everything rips and tears like hunger. Lying on his back among the envious flowers, her hand on his tummy (lightly steadied by a speculative paw), the tail in tune with the slow heartbeat, the little puppy fairly choked and drowned in his little sea of joy. Ah, the piercing peace. All covered in heaven— puppy heaven! For many hours they rolled and cuddled and snuggled and nuzzled, until the color of the day began to change.

  "Oh no," said the girl.

  She ran away in vivid terror. Told to stay, the little puppy followed her, as unobtrusively as possible, averting his glance whenever she turned to shoo him back (as though he believed that if he couldn't see her, then she couldn't see him). But now Andromeda paused in her flight and stood her ground to warn him.

  "Stay. Be careful of the dog. Come tomorrow. Promise. Stay, but please don't go away. Stay! Oh stay."

  Deeply puzzled, his tail uncertainly working, the little puppy watched her run, down the valley toward the gaping crater, where the fires were already boiling, black-veined, as they started to consume the air of the dusk.

  During the next wave or packet of time, the life of the little puppy that could resembled a gorgeous and dreadful dream, the two states—panic and rapture—welded as close as the two faces of a knife; sometimes he felt his heart might crack and ooze with the incredible uncertainty of it all. But, being a puppy, he spent much of his time in the unaltered conditions, the extremes. When Andromeda loomed above him, her sun-warmed hair patterned with magical flowers, when she tickled both sets of ribs and kissed his hot belly, do you think the little puppy was anything but definitively flattened with joy? Life was all foreplay, wonderful foreplay. The little puppy devised other games too: the game where he ran very fast toward her and then veered off at the last second; the game where he ran around her in concentric circles wherever she went; the game where he ran away quite languidly and then skipped out of reach when she approached; and so on. Andromeda seemed uncharacteristically slow to catch on to his games—perhaps because the little puppy was so weak and sickly now, and so easily tired. Yet he wouldn't stop. There was an edge of delirium in his romps. Often, too, he came a cropper on some of his more ambitious maneuvers. One afternoon, after hours of prompting, she was persuaded to play the stick game, whereby she threw a stick and the little puppy ran after it —returning it to her, or not, depending on his puppyish whim. By accident she once threw the stick into the creek, and the little puppy hurled himself in there after it. He appeared to be in some difficulties for a while; certainly he had quite a coughing fit on the bank when Andromeda hauled him out. She noticed then, as he lay recovering by her side, that his tail and back paws were badly scalded and enflamed. She looked down at him with a worried frown. The little puppy blinked up at her gratefully. Through the spokes of his wet lashes, and what with all the photospheric brilliance above and behind her, well, she looked—she looked to him like a stern and formidable angel, divine essence, a Power, a Dominion, a Throne, covered in prismatic jewelry, sliding down the sun's rays. Of course we must remember the little puppy's poor eyesight . . .oh, that poor little puppy.

  Because the nights were so different, so much longer than the days (at least three times as long), and so full of fear. Squirming in his burrow, while the great animal, senior and atrocious, tore greedily at the narrow opening, the little puppy had no thoughts for the day—the distant, the derisory day. He didn't understand. How had he unleashed such rage in a creature which, or so he felt, he might have looked to for love, for protection, for play? He didn't understand. But he understood one thing; he made a certain distinction, a nice one too. The little puppy understood the difference between, terror and horror. Terror was when the girl had gone and n
ight began to come, wiping color from the world. Horror was when the beast was actually there, the flames of its breath at the opening of the burrow, the saliva that seared the little puppy's rump.

  "This can't go on," said Andromeda one morning, when she found the little puppy sneezing and dozing and trembling by the nervous creek. He couldn't eat the food she had smuggled out for him. Reflexively he lifted himself up for a romp, but his hind legs gave way, and he rolled back on to the grass with a fatalistic sigh. Usually when she looked at the little puppy Andromeda always thought: life! Here is life. But now the possibility occurred to her (long-postponed, an idea that made her whole body bend with nausea) that the little puppy was dying. It could be that the little puppy just wasn't going to make it. For you understand that fear had quite emptied him—fear, and intense puppy loneliness, the need for inclusion, the need to be ... inside.

  Andromeda gulped and said, "I don't care. I'm taking you home with me. Now. I don't care."

  And so, very, very carefully, Andromeda bedded down the little floppy-limbed puppy at the bottom of her basket, and covered his weak protesting form with flowers and white grapes and a pink handkerchief. The little puppy was slow to understand this game and would persistently writhe and struggle, and seem to grin, and then play dead. "Shsh," Andromeda kept telling him, but he went on whimpering and elbowing about until at last he was aloft. The air-travel appeared to soothe him. A mile from the village, on the brink of the enfolding hill, she plonked the basket down, lifted the hanky, and gave the little puppy a good talking-to, with much play of the raised forefinger, the stamped foot, the meaning frown. In fact the little puppy was so flummoxed and confused by this stage that he stared up at Andromeda with candid incuriosity—and even yawned in her face. On they went, down into the ringed village. "Good day, good day," came the voices, and Andromeda sang songs at the top of her voice, lest the little puppy should unwarily choose to whinny or yelp. But the little puppy was very good and didn't make a sound. (To be quite honest, he was fast asleep.) When she reached the cabin Andromeda got up on tiptoe and peered in. Keithette was not about. Nor was Tom. So little Andromeda took the little puppy straight to her little room.

  Now Andromeda had a lot of explaining to do (this had better be good!). And so, come to that, have we.

  As things now stood, the village was the food of the dog —and the dog was, if not the worst of all possible dogs, then certainly the worst dog yet. The genetic policemen and bouncers that once kept species apart had loosened their hold on the living world. In less temperate zones than where lies our scene, there were creatures that limped and flapped in strange crevices between the old kingdoms, half fauna half flora, half insect half reptile, half bird half fish. Natural selection had given way to a kind of reverse discrimination —or tokenism. Any bloody fool of an amphibious parrot or disgraceful three-winged stoat had as much chance of survival, of success, as the slickest, the niftiest, the most singleminded dreck-eating ratlet or invincibly carapaced predator. Many human beings, too, were mildly dismayed to find themselves traveling backward down their evolutionary flarepaths—or, worse, sideways, into some uncharted humiliation of webs and pouches, of trotters and beaks. People, of whom there were few, tended to thin out near the deserts, of which there were plenty. In the deserts the lower forms flourished unchecked in their chaos: you could hardly turn your head without seeing some multipedic hyena or doubledecker superworm pulsing toward you over the mottled sands. The village lay to the north, not too far from the glasslands of ice. At these select latitudes, after its decades of inimical quiet, the planet earth was once again an hospitable, even a fashionable address. With so much food—with so much space and weather— nature had little selecting to do. Until the dog.

  Perhaps the dog, then, was the Natural Selector. The dog was eight feet long and four feet high, very lumpily put together, the rolling, snapping head loosely joined to the top-heavy shoulders. In place of a tail he sported an extra limb, bare tibia, tendon and talon—quite useless, and far from decorative. His eyes were a scurvy yellow, his saliva a loud crimson, venomous and also acidic, capable of entirely dissolving human bones. The dog was the beneficiary of a new symbiotic arrangement whereby he healthily played host to several serious but by now ineffective diseases, his numerous parasites having (in this case) taken on rather more than they could handle. In times of yore the dog ate pretty well anything he could keep down, like a shark. These days, though, he was exclusively, even religiously homovorous. He looked bad on his diet. There never was a clearer demonstration of the fact that you shouldn't eat human beings. The dog's chief personal breakthrough was his coat, which was thick, patchy, fungoid and yet synthetic-looking, too shiny, like rayon or lurex. He was the first dog to earn a crust, to eke out a living in the northern lands. The village was his food. He seemed to need about one human being a week. He wasn't all that greedy, and human beings, he found, went a long way.

  Nobody in the village had any idea what to do about the dog. Well, they had their shameful strategy; but it wasn't working. Idlers in a rejuvenated world, they had long lost the noble arts of survival and advantage, let alone fighting and killing. No one knew how to raise hell anymore. They milked the land of its rich life: indeed, some of the plants were as nutritious and sanguinary as meat itself; yes, many plants bled. They used few tools, and no weapons. Even fire they hoped soon to foreswear. This was the way the world was now.

  For the next couple of days the little puppy was so very poorly that Andromeda was able to keep him bedded down in her clothes cupboard without much fear of detection. Sometimes, in a trance of foreboding, she found herself on the brink of resigning herself to the loss of her new friend. "Stay," she would whisper to him urgently. "Don't leave me. Stay, oh please stay." At night Andromeda brought the little puppy a selection of juicy vegetables and encouraged him to eat. He seemed grateful for the sympathy, for the comfort, but turned away from the food, and sighed his long-suffering sigh. Then on the third day . . . Well, Andromeda was slowly eating breakfast with Keithette and Tom, her mother and "father." In the silence the sun played subatomic ball with the moody motes of dust. Both Andromeda and Tom were eying Keithette a little warily. No one had spoken with any freedom that morning, because Keithette had yet to select and announce her mood-day. There were seven to chose from (all different now, all sad days, since the dog): Shunday, Moanday, Tearsday, Woundsday, Thirstday, Fireday, Shatterday. . . . Tom was crushing henna into a mortar bowl and saying, "I prefer the single braid anyway."

  "Why?" asked Keithette pitilessly. She was a rosy, broad-faced woman, stocky and flat-chested (the standard female form these days); but at such moments her mouth looked as thin as a fissure in glass. "Why? Please tell me, Tom."

  Tom laid aside his pestle and made a two-handed gesture of shaping. "Perhaps because it shows—it shows the essential oneness of your nature."

  This was a bit much for Keithette. "What oneness?" she said, and folded her arms tightly. "Go on. What oneness?"

  And now Tom, too, was stumped. "I don't really know," he said. "But I'm sure that ribbon looks very nice with the dress."

  Keithette may have been about to soften. We shall never know. At that moment, just as Andromeda watchfully raised the wooden spoon to her lips—they heard a distinct little bark from beyond the kitchen door. . . . The three figures reared and stiffened. Time went on for a while with nothing happening inside it, and the moment might well have passed intact if there hadn't come a second yelp, more emboldened and demanding than the first. Andromeda's alarm was acute. She made to speak but was quickly checked by an unpierceable glare from her mother. Then came the third yelp.

  "Shatterday," said Keithette.

  But now she rose up, seeming to swell and take fire with the woman's need to confront the worst. Keithette strode to the passage door, Andromeda and Tom a couple of feet behind her. She turned, resolute and incensed, before she seized the handle. The door opened like a lid.

  And what should they see but
the little puppy, quite recovered, full of beans in fact, only briefly startled and now skipping and twisting, feinting this way and that, and wagging his tail with such violence that his entire rear end was just a furry little blur. Then he swooned onto his back with his cocked paws aloft. Andromeda burst out crying and pushed herself through to kneel at the little puppy's side.

  "What's that?" said Keithette.

  "Leave him alone," said Andromeda. "He's a little— 'puppy,'" she explained, with a new effort showing in her eyes. "A little puppy."

  Adorably the little puppy gazed upward.

  "My little puppy," said Andromeda.

  "Why do I put up with her?" Keithette began. "Answer me, Tom. Please answer me. Where did it come from? Right from the start she never gave me a moment's peace. Why can't she be like any other little girl? Why? Why? That's right. I'll pack you off to live with the children. Or the Queers! Where did you find it? Now you listen to me, Andromeda. Andromeda, indeed. Her own name's not good enough for her. She has to go and call herself Andromeda! What's it doing now? Well, I'll tell you one thing, young lady. It's not staying here."

  It took many hours of supplication, many Blametakes and Faultfinds, and much work for Tom on the mat, over the tub, and in the sack, great play being made with the hot towels and cold compresses, the back scratchers and skin loofahs, not to mention all the hair stroking, neck nuzzling, and breast kissing—plus the tireless and tearful pleas of tiny Andromeda—but in the end Keithette was pretty well won over to the little puppy's presence, a presence that was understood to be temporary, contingent, multiprovisoed. Naturally, the ruling could be reversed at a single snap of Keithette's brawny red fingers. Ah, but what could you do when it came to a little puppy like this one, with his ridiculous frown and his beseeching eyes? All the little puppy had going for him, really, was his adorability. And he was adorable—yes he was. After the countless promises and penances, the clauses and covenants of the long afternoon, Keithette herself seemed quite exhausted by the fray.