The Puppies Of Terra

Chapter Eleven
In which I commit myself to the Philosophy of Dingoism.

The next week went by at a pace that would have been nightmarish if I hadn’t been so giddily, busily happy. First off, I married Julie once again—this time in accordance with the rites of the Dingoes. Daddy explained that in some matters—marriage most especially—the Dingoes could be as great sticklers for ceremony as my brother Pluto. Darling, Julie entered into the spirit of things with enthusiastic atavism, and I suspect now that part of Daddy’s insistence had had its origin in my once-again-newlywed bride. Still, it was a well-wrought ceremony, which even Pluto might have approved. Hymen’s candle never burned brighter than on the day that our hands were joined over the glowing vacuum tube on the altar of the renovated power station.

We had our first quarrel as newlyweds an hour afterward, when Julie told me that she’d known about Daddy and the ordeal he was preparing for me on the day she had come to visit me in the courthouse jail. But the quarrel ended as soon as Julie had pointed out that, since I’d passed the test so well, I had no cause for anger. I hate to think what might have happened however, if I’d agreed to make the “declaration” that Daddy had proposed.

The moment I had dreaded most—when I should have to inform Daddy that the pet who had been executed with me was also his son—passed by without ruffling his considerable equanimity. He had known all the while, through Julie, and he had gone right ahead and ordered the execution, in order, so he claimed, to set me a sobering example of man’s mortality and the likely price of rebellion.

“But your own son!” I protested. “What bond is stronger than between father and son?”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s all very true—though that bond is somewhat attentuated when one has had hundreds of sons. But consider, Dennis—he was committing incest. So, even exclusive of his political crimes, which are great…”

“Daddy—you’re smiling that certain way again. I suspect there’s a trick up your sleeve.”

“Come see a movie, Dennis. If I told you, you wouldn’t, perhaps, believe.”

The film showed four pallbearers (by their physiques and nakedness one could tell they were pets) supporting a pallet upon which the corpse of St Bernard had been composed. They were climbing the twisty path to Needlepoint Hill. Reaching the summit, they laid down their burden and watched as a nimbus of golden light formed above the dead body: St Bernard’s Master had been summoned back to the hill.

The fingers trembled—and there is nothing to which I can compare the beauty of that moment unless it be the “Creation of Adam” panel in the Sistine Chapel—the eyelids fluttered (telephoto lens now) and opened. St Bernard, gloriously resurrected, began to sing Beethoven’s Ninth. Then, slowly, the five bodies rose into the air, caroling their joy. With such a happy ending, I couldn’t hold the charade of the execution against Daddy.

From the first Julie and I were celebrities among the Dingoes. At a steady succession of lunches, dinners, and dances, we played the parts of refugees from the “tyranny of the Masters, grateful for this new-found freedom”. That’s a quote from the speech that Daddy wrote for me to deliver on such occasions. It always draws applause. Dingoes have no taste.

While I acted my rôle as a model revolutionary, I carried on another drama inwardly. Had it been merely a contest between filial piety and my loyalty to the Masters, I would not have hesitated long, for filial piety is negligible when for seventeen years one has presumed one’s father dead.

But mine had been no ordinary father. He had been Tennyson White, and he had written A Dog’s Life. Now I discovered there was a sequel to that book.

I read through The Life of Man in one sitting of fifteen hours’ duration. It was one of the most shattering experiences of my life. In fact, right at this moment, I can’t remember any others comparable.

Anyone who’s read it realizes the difficulty one faces trying to describe The Life of Man. It’s got a little of everything: satire, polemic, melodrama, farce. After the classic unity of A Dog’s Life, the sequel strikes at one’s sensibilities like a jet of water from a high-pressure hose. It begins with the same high and dry irony, the same subdued wit, but gradually—it’s hard to say just when—the viewpoint shifts. Scenes from the first novel are repeated verbatim, but now its pleasantries have become horrors. Allegory gives way to a brutal, damning realism, and every word of it seemed an accusation aimed directly at me. After the first reading, I had no more distinct memory of it than I would have had of a hammer blow. And so I entirely overlooked the fact that The Life of Man is autobiography from first to last.

As I have earlier noted, my father Tennyson White belonged to the first generation of humans to grow up away from the planet Earth. He had had an exemplary upbringing on Ceres; then, when it was discovered he had leukemia, he was relegated to a second-rate Earthside hospital while the Masters argued the “sporting proposition” of his fate. It was then that he lost his faith in the Mastery, and it was then that he drew up the outlines for both his great novels. It was then too that Daddy contacted the leaders of the Dingoes and mapped out with their aid a program for revolution. A Dog’s Life was to be the overture to that program.

Many authors have been accused of corrupting youth and debasing the moral coinage of their times. Probably none has ever set about so deliberately as Daddy. His novel was a time-bomb disguised as an Easter egg and planted right in the middle of the Master’s basket; it was a Trojan horse; it was a slow-working acid that nibbled at the minds of the pets—just a mild, aesthetic tickle at first, then it worked in deeper, an abrasive that scarred them with guilt. For men, in the last analysis, are not meant to be domestic animals.

Those who stood the acid-test of that novel managed to escape to Earth and join the Dingoes (feigning, like Daddy, to having been butchered). Those who didn’t (and sadly, these were by far the majority) stayed with the Masters and incorporated the monstrous satire of A Dog’s Life into the fabric of their daily lives. They became dogs.

A decade after the publication of A Dog’s Life, Daddy effected his own escape to Earth. He managed to prevent the Master of Ganymede from realizing his intentions, then or later, by deliberately jumbling his true feelings and firm purpose among the welter of fictional ideas that were forever teeming in his fertile fancy. He further deceived his Master by surrounding this “plot” with such lustreless or unpleasant images (the ear, for instance) that his Master never encouraged him to cultivate this train of thought—nor examined it himself with more than cursory attention.

Daddy’s autobiography makes no mention of the fact that he left his two sons (to mention only Pluto and me) behind when he went over to the Dingoes, and he refuses to talk about it still. I have always suspected that he doubted, if only slightly, whether he was doing the right thing in leaving the Masters. It was a large enough doubt that he was willing to let us decide for ourselves whether we wished to become Dingoes or remain Leashed.

In 2024 Earth was swarming with refugees from the Mastery, and the revolutionary movement—the Revolutionary Inductance Corps, or RIC—was getting on its feet. (Naturally, the Dingoes didn’t call themselves “Dingoes”.) Daddy’s next task was more difficult, for he had to forge an army from the unorganized mass of apathetic Dingoes who had never left Earth. The Life of Man accomplished part of this purpose, for it showed the Dingoes what they were: an amorphous mass of discontent, without program or purpose; a race that had taken the first step towards its own extinction.

But the Dingoes were not such novel-readers as the pets. Only the more thoughtful read this second novel—and they didn’t need to. Daddy gradually came to see that no amount of literature would spark the tinder of the Dingoes into a revolutionary firebrand.

And so it was—and now we leave Daddy’s autobiography and enter the sphere of raw history—that my father invented a mythology.

The Dingoes were ripe for one. Ever since the first Manifestation in the ‘70’s, organized religion had become quite disorganized. The Master bore too close a resemblance to mankind’s favorite gods, and men of religious or mystical sensibilities were among the first to volunteer for the kennels, where they could contemplate the very-nearly-divine nature of the Masters without any of the usual discomforts of the ascetic life. The Dingoes, on the other hand, found it difficult to venerate gods who so much resembled their sworn enemies.

Daddy realized that under these conditions the Dingoes might accept a “religion” of demonology and sympathetic magic. When the gods are malign, men turn to jujus and totems.

But wax dolls and devil masks would no longer do, for the first law of sympathetic magic is that “Like produces like.” The Masters were electromagnetic phenomena: then what better talisman than a dry cell? In any elementary physics text, there was a wealth of arcane lore, hieratic symbols, and even battle cries. Children were taught Kirchoff’s laws in their cradles, and revolutionaries wore cork helmets to ward off the Masters—since cork was a good insulator. It was nonsense, but it was effective nonsense. The Revolutionary Inductance Corps won an overwhelming majority in the council of the Dingoes on the slogan: ELECT RIC. Daddy became Diode in the revolutionary government, next in authority to the High Cathode himself. Everyone was ready to begin the revolution, and no one had the least idea how to go about it.

Which goes to show that it’s good to be prepared, because that was when the providential sunspot short-circuited the Masters. The leaders of the Dingoes had managed to take credit for their own good luck, but now a month had passed since S-Day, and gradually the Masters were reasserting their old claims to dominion. Electric light and power were back on (though the Dingoes refused to use them); the kennels were back in place beneath their force-field domes; the captured pets were being systematically repossessed, the most imposing demonstration of this having been the massive escape from Needlepoint Hill. In a very short time the Mastery would be established stronger than ever, unless the Dingoes found a way to stop them.

Cork helmets may be good for morale, but in a real contest I’d as soon defend myself with a popgun. If the Dingoes had made any serious plans, Daddy wasn’t telling me about them.

Daddy, Julie, and I had been waiting in the lobby of the St Paul Hotel for fifteen minutes, and in all that time we hadn’t seen one room clerk or bellboy. There weren’t even any guests, for Earth had become so depopulated during the Mastery that a roof and a bed were always easy to come by. What you couldn’t find anywhere was labor. Even the best hotels and restaurants were self-service.

Finally Bruno and Rocky (for this had come to seem a better name for her than Roxanna) finished dressing and came down to the lobby. Bruno was wearing an unpressed cotton suit and a bowling shirt open at the neck, so that a little bit of the bandage about his chest peeped out. Rocky was dressed to kill; Darling, Julie looked as staid as a nun by comparison. But when you’re only twenty years old you don’t have to try as hard as when you’re thirty-eight.

We exchanged pleasantries, decided on a restaurant, and went out to Daddy’s car—and thus began the ghastliest evening of my life.

Bruno was returning to his post in Duluth the next day, and we’d been unable to put him off any longer. For weeks he’d been insisting that the five of us—the two Schwarzkopfs and the three Whites—“make a night of it”. I felt guilty toward Bruno, and at that time I hadn’t yet learned to live with a guilty conscience. I gave in.

I should have been suspicious of overtures of friendship from a man I’d nearly murdered, or I might have simply supposed that, like most Dingoes, Bruno was chiefly interested in making my father’s acquaintance. However, his first overture had come before he knew my father was Tennyson White, and so it was hard to doubt his sincerity. I decided that he was only mad.

If I felt guilty and awkward toward Bruno, I can’t imagine how Rocky felt toward me. When she revealed my identity to the Dingoes, she couldn’t have known that my father was the second-in-command of their forces—not, as she had supposed, their arch-enemy. Only initiated members of the RIC knew who their leaders were, and his novel, The Life of Man, which had won her over to the Dingo viewpoint (to the degree that Bruno hadn’t accomplished this purpose), had been published pseudonymously. She had intended to see me executed; instead she had saved my life. Now we were sitting next to each other in the back seat of Daddy’s limousine, talking about old times. When we got out, she managed to bring her spiked heel down on my instep with lethal accuracy, and once, in the middle of dinner, smiling brightly and chattering all the while, she kicked me square in the shin, underneath the tablecloth.

The meal wouldn’t have gone beyond the main course if it hadn’t been that almost all of Rocky’s remarks went over Bruno’s head. He was dauntlessly ebullient, and when he started to talk, he could go on indefinitely. To shut off Rocky (who couldn’t hear enough about our wedding; she was so glad that dear little Petite wasn’t a bastard any more), I questioned Bruno about his childhood, which had been spectacularly awful—or so it seemed to me. For the majority of Dingoes, life is one long battle: against the world, against their families, against their teachers, and against the decay of their own minds and bodies. No wonder Bruno was the aggressive lout that he was. But knowing this didn’t make me like him any better.

When the dinner was done and I thought we might make our escape, Bruno brought out an envelope from his coat-pocket and announced, as though he really expected us to be pleased, that he had five tickets for the fight.

“What fight?” I asked.

“The boxing match at the armory. Kelly Broughan’s there tonight, so it should be worth seeing. I bet you don’t see many good fights out there in the asteroids, do you?”

“No,” I said in defeated tones. “None at all.”

“There are some beautiful gymnastic competitions though,” Julie put in. “And fencing, though no one is ever hurt.”

Bruno’s laugh was the bellow of a wounded bull. Gymnastics was a good joke; beautiful was even better. “You’re a card, Julie. Dennis, that girl’s a card.”

Rocky’s eyes gleamed wickedly, intent upon prey. “Dennis, you really must come, seeing that you’re such a little scrapper yourself. And you too, Mr White. You look worn out. A man in your position needs diversions now and then.”

“What the hell,” Daddy said, “let’s all go! And afterwards we’ll watch the fireworks.”

“Oh, I love fireworks,” Julie said with forced cheer.

We got up from the table with one accord. Bruno and Rocky were as happy as two children. Julie and I were glum. But Daddy…

Daddy was in so profound an abyss of depression and defeat that he was quite literally unaware of most of what was going on around him. He knew, as we did not, that the Masters had presented their ultimatum to the Dingoes that day. It had been decided that mankind could not be entrusted with its own affairs. All men were henceforth to be put in kennels; there would be no more distinction between Dingoes and pets. The High Cathode had been thrown into a panic by this threat, and it had been determined, despite Daddy’s pleading to the contrary, that the Dingoes would shoot their wad that evening.

The Dingoes’ wad—as Daddy knew, and as they apparently did not—wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. All they had was atom bombs.

Whether it was because Bruno knew the gate-attendant or because Daddy was with us, I don’t know, but our general-admission tickets got us seats at ringside. The audience in the smoky indoors stadium made the crowd at the parade sound like a bevy of tranquilized sheep. One woman near us (and I am convinced that it was the same who had kissed me in Duluth and cursed me at the gallows) was screaming: “Murder him! Murder the m——!” And the fight hadn’t even begun!

A bell rang. Two men, modestly nude except for colored briefs, approached each other, moving their arms in nervous rhythms, circling about warily. One (in red trunks) lashed out at the other with his left hand, a feint to the stomach. With his right hand, he swung at the other man’s face. There was a cracking sound as his naked fist connected with his opponent’s cheekbone. The crowd began to scream.

Blood spurted from the man’s nose. I averted my eyes. Bruno, in his element, added his distinctive bellow to the uproar. Rocky watched me closely, treasuring my every blanch and wince. Daddy looked bored, and Julie kept her eyes shut through the whole thing. I should have done the same, but when I heard another thunk of bone on flesh and a loud crash, curiosity overcame my finer feelings and I looked back into the ring. The man in red trunks was lying on his back, his expressionless face a scant few inches from my own. The blood flowed from his nose and flooded the sockets of his eyes. Rocky was shrieking with pleasure, but Bruno, who felt an allegiance for the fighter in red trunks shouted, “Get up, you bum!”

I rose from my seat, mumbling apologies, and found my way outside, where I was discreetly sick in a hedge across the street from the Armory. Though I felt weak, I knew that I did not have to faint. The Masters’ conditioning was wearing off!

The hedge bordered on a park which had been allowed to go to seed. Through the thick summer foliage I could see the glint of moonlit water. I strolled down the hillside to the pond’s edge.

Down there, the din of the stadium melted into the other night sounds: the croaking of the frogs, the rustle of poplar leaves, the rippling water. It was quiet and Earthlike.

A full moon shone overhead, like the echo of a thousand poems. All the Earthbound poets who had stolen the fire of their lyrics from that moon, age after age! It had passed them by, oblivious of histories, and it would pass me by in time. That’s the way that things should be, I thought. The leaves should fall in autumn, snow in winter, grass springs up in spring, and the summer is brief.

I knew then that I belonged to the Earth, and my spirit dilated with happiness. It wasn’t quite the right time to be happy—but there it was. Julie and the moon were part of it, but it was also the frogs croaking, the poplars, the stadium; Daddy, cynical, aspiring, even defeated; partly too, it was Bruno and Roxanna, if only because they were so vital. These things melted into my memory of the farmhouse, and it seemed that I could smell the winy smell of apples rotting in the grass.

The sky was growing brighter and brighter. The moon…

But was it the moon? A cloud of mist had gathered above the pond and it glowed until the full moon was almost blotted out behind it.

The Meshes of the Leash closed over my mind, and a voice inside my head purred kindly: White Fang, good boy! It’s all right now. We heard your call… (But I hadn’t called! It was just that I had been so happy!) …and now I’ve come. Your Master has come back at last for you.

I cried out then, a simple cry of pain. To be taken away now! Only a few days before I had cried for the lack of this voice, and now—“NO!”

There, it soothed, there, there, there. Has it been bad? Has it been that very bad? Those terrible Dingoes have captured you, but it won’t happen again. There, there.

The Leash began gently to stroke the sensory areas of the cortex: soft fur wrapped me, scented with musk. Faint ripples of harp-music (or was that only the water of the pond?) sounded behind my Master’s voice, which poured forth comforting words, like salve spread over a wound.

Then, with a sudden pang, I remembered Daddy. (Don’t think of your poor father, the Leash bade.)

He was waiting for me. Julie was waiting for me. The Dingoes were waiting for me. (We’ll get Julie back too. Now, don’t you worry yourself any more about those nasty Dingoes. Soon there won’t be any Dingoes, ever, ever at all.)

Desperately I tried not to think—or at least to keep my thoughts so scrambled that I would not betray the things I knew. But it was exactly this effort that focused my thoughts on the forbidden subjects.

I tried to think of nonsense, of poetry, of the moon, dim behind the glowing air. But the Leash, sensing my resistance, closed tighter around my mind, and cut through my thin web of camouflage. It shuffled through my memory as though it were a deck of cards, and it stopped (there was just time enough for me to catch the images then) to examine images of my father with particular attention.

There was, on the very edge of my perception, a sound: Ourrp. Which was repeated: Ourrp. It was not a sound my Leash would make. The harp-music quavered for a moment, becoming a prosaic ripple of water. I concentrated on that single sound, straining against my Leash.

“What is that sound?” I asked my Master. To answer me he had to stop sorting through my memories. Nothing. It’s nothing. Don’t think about it. Listen to the beautiful music, why don’t you? Think of your father.

Whatever was making the sound seemed to be down in the grass. I could see clearly in the wash of light from the nimbus above me. I parted the grass at my feet, and I saw the beastly thing.

Don’t think about it!

The front half of a frog projected from the distended jaws of a water snake. The snake, seeing me, writhed, pulling his victim into the denser grass.

Again the Leash bade me not to look at this thing, and, truly, I did not want to. It was so horrible, but I could not help myself.

The frog had stretched his front legs to the side to prevent the last swallow that would end him. Meanwhile, the back half of him was being digested. He emitted another melancholy Ourrp.

Horrible, I thought. Oh, horrible, horrible, horrible!

Stop this. You… must… stop…

The snake lashed his body, wriggling slowly backwards. The frog’s front feet grasped at sprigs of grass. His Ourrp had grown quite weak. In the failing light, I almost lost sight of the struggle in the shadow of the tall grass. I bent closer.

In the moon’s light I could see a thin line of white froth about the snake’s gaping jaws.