Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (35 page)

(The dogs gather in parks and gardens, anywhere close to food and water where they can stay out of people’s way. Cruz Park ten blocks away is big, fifteen acres in the middle of town, and sixty or more dogs already have gathered there. They raid trash or beg from their former owners or strangers. They sleep under the bushes and bandstand and the inexpensive civic sculptures. No one goes to Cruz Park on their lunch breaks anymore.

(In contrast North Park is a little dead end. No one ever did go there, and so no one really worries much about the dogs there. Not yet.)

 

The next day after classes (hot again, and heavy with the smell of cut grass), Linna finds a dog. She hears crying and crouches to peek under a hydrangea, its blue-gray flowers as fragile as paper. It’s a Maltese with filthy fur matted with twigs and burrs. There are stains under her eyes and she is moaning, the terrible sound of an injured animal.

The Maltese comes nervous to Linna’s outstretched fingers and the murmur of her voice. “I won’t hurt you,” Linna says. “It’s okay.”

Linna picks the dog up carefully, feeling the dog flinch under her hand as she checks for injuries. Linna knows already that the pain is not physical; she knows the dog’s story before she hears it.

The house nearby is massive, a graceful collection of Edwardian gingerbread-work and oriel windows and dark-green roof tiles. The garden is large, with a low fence just tall enough to keep a Maltese in. Or out. A woman answers the doorbell: Linna can feel the Maltese vibrate in her arms at the sight of the woman: excitement, not fear.

“Is this your dog?” Linna asks with a smile. “I found her outside, scared.”

The woman’s eyes flicker to the dog and away, back to Linna’s face. “We don’t have a dog,” she says.

(We like our slaves mute. We like to imagine they love us, and they do. But they are also with us because freedom and security war in each of us, and sometimes security wins out. They do love us. But.)

In those words Linna has already seen how this conversation will go, the denials and the tangled fear and anguish and self-loathing of the woman. Linna turns away in the middle of the woman’s words and walks down the stairs, the brick walkway, through the gate and north, toward North Park.

The dog’s name is Sophie. The other dogs are kind to her.

(When George Washington died, his will promised freedom for his slaves, but only after his wife had also passed on. A terrified Martha freed them within hours of his death. Though the dogs love us, thoughtful owners can’t help but wonder what they think when they sit on the floor beside our beds as we sleep, teeth slightly bared as they pant in the heat. Do the dogs realize that their freedom hangs by the thread of our lives? The curse of speech—the things they could say and yet choose not to say—makes that thread seem very thin.

(Some people keep their dogs, even after the Change. Some people have the strength to love, no matter what. But many of us only learn the limits of our love when they have been breached. Some people keep their dogs; many do not.

(The dogs who stay seem to tell no stories.)

“
Oh, oh oh,” moans the dog. “I told the rats a great secret and now they won’t let me rest.”

“
Huge,” One Dog says.

“
Are the rats fierce?” says the youngest.

“
Not at all,” One Dog tells the possums. “If they weren’t inside me, they wouldn’t be any trouble, even for a possum. Ow! I can feel one dragging bits of bacon around.”

“
If you catch any rats, I’ll never eat another possum,” she promises.

“
This is much better than dog food or trash,” she says.

 

(Dogs love us. We have bred them to do this for ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years. It’s hard to make a dog hate people, though we have at times tried, with our junkyard guards and our attack dogs.

(It’s hard to make dogs hate people, but it is possible.)

Another day, just at dusk, the sky an indescribable violet. Linna has a hard time telling how many dogs there are now: ten or twelve, perhaps. The dogs around her snuffle, yip, bark. One moans, the sound of a sled dog trying to howl. Words float up:
dry, bite, food, piss
.

The sled dog continues its moaning howl, and one by one the others join in with drawn-out barks and moans. They are trying to howl as a pack, but none of them know how to do this, nor what it is supposed to sound like. It’s a wolf-secret, and they do not know any of those.

Sitting on a picnic table, Linna closes her eyes to listen. The dogs outyell the trees’ restless whispers, the river’s wet sliding, even the hissing roaring street. Ten dogs, or fifteen. Or more: Linna can’t tell, because they are all around her now, in the brush, down by the Kaw’s muddy bank, behind the cottonwoods, beside the tall fence that separates the park from the street.

The misformed howl, the hint of killing animals gathered to work efficiently together—it awakens a monkey-place somewhere in her corpus callosum, or even deeper, stained into her genes. Adrenaline hits hot as panic. Her heart beats so hard that it feels as though she’s torn it. Her monkey-self opens her eyes to watch the dogs through pupils constricted enough to dim the twilight; it clasps her arms tight over her soft belly to protect the intestines and liver that are the first parts eaten; it tucks her head between her shoulders to protect her neck and throat. She pants through bared teeth, fighting a keening noise.

Several of the dogs don’t even try to howl. Gold is one of them. (The howling would have defined them before the poisoned gift of speech; but the dogs have words now. They will never be free of stories, though their stories may free them. Gold may understand this.

(They were wolves once, ten thousand, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. Or more. And before we were men and women, we were monkeys and fair game for them. After a time we grew taller and stronger and smarter: human, eventually. We learned about fire and weapons. If you can tame it, a wolf is an effective weapon, a useful tool. If you can keep it. We learned how to keep wolves close.

(But we were monkeys first, and they were wolves. Blood doesn’t forget.)

After a thousand heartbeats fast as birds’, long after the howl has decayed into snuffling and play-barks and speech, Linna eases back into her forebrain. Alive and safe. But not untouched. Gold tells a tale.

“
That’s not human,” the people say. “We stand on our hind legs and sleep on our backs. First you must do these things.”

 

Linna calls the Humane Society the next day, though she feels like a traitor to the dogs for doing this. The sky is sullen with the promise of rainstorms, and even though she knows that rain is not such a big problem in the life of a dog, she worries a little, remembering her own dog when she was a little girl, who had been terrified of thunder.

So she calls. The phone rings fourteen times before someone picks it up. Linna tells the woman about the dogs of North Park. “Is there anything we can do?”

The woman barks a single unamused laugh. “I wish. People keep bringing them—been doing that since right after the Change. We’re packed to the rafters—and they
keep
bringing them in, or just dumping them in the parking lot, too chickenshit to come in and tell anyone.”

“So—” Linna begins, but she has no idea what to ask. She can see the scene in her mind, a hundred or more terrified angry confused grieving hungry thirsty dogs. At least the dogs of North Park have some food and water, and the shelter of the underbrush at night.

The woman has continued “—they can’t take care of themselves—”

“Do you know that?” Linna asks, but the woman talks on.

“—and we don’t have the resources—”

“So what do you do?” Linna interrupts. “Put them to sleep?”

“If we have to,” the woman says, and her voice is so weary that Linna wants suddenly to comfort her. “They’re in the runs, four and five in each one because we don’t have anywhere to put them, and we can’t get them outside because the paddocks are full; it smells like you wouldn’t believe. And they tell these stories—”

“What’s going to happen to them?” Linna means all the dogs, now that they have speech, now that they are equals.

“Oh, hon, I don’t know.” The woman’s voice trembles. “But I know we can’t save them all.”

(Why do we fear them when they learn speech? They are still dogs, still subordinate. It doesn’t change who they are or their loyalty.

(It is not always fear we run from. Sometimes it is shame.)

 

(How do the dogs know things? How do they frame an abstract like
thank you
or a collective concept like chicken? Since the Change, everyone has been asking that question. If awareness is dependent on linguistics, an answer is that the dogs have learned to use words, so the words themselves are the frame they use. But it is still
our
frame,
our
language. They are still not free.

(Any more than we are.)

It is a moonless night, and the hot wet air blurs the streetlights so that they illuminate nothing except their own glass globes. Linna is there, though it is very late. She no longer attends her classes and has switched to the dogs’ schedule, sleeping the afternoons away in the safety of her apartment. She cannot bring herself to sleep in the dogs’ presence. In the park, she is taut as a strung wire, a single monkey among wolves; but she returns each dusk, and listens, and sometimes speaks. There are maybe fifteen dogs now, though she’s sure more hide in the bushes, or doze, or prowl for food.