The Puppies Of Terra

Chapter One
In which I am born, and my father is done in by Dingoes.

My name is White Fang, though of course that is not really my name. My name is really Dennis White, now. I like the old name better; it is more in keeping with the image I have of myself. But perhaps such an attitude is just a hangover from the time I was a pet. Some people would say that once you’ve been a pet, once you’ve grown used to the Leash, you’re never quite human again—in the sense of being free. I don’t know about that. Of course, it is more fun to be Leashed, but one can learn not to want it so badly. I did. And this, in one sense, is the story of how I did it.

As a puppy…

But already I have made a botch of it! For will not most of my readers resent such a phrase? Puppies, Pets, Masters, Leashes: the old way of speaking has come to have almost the force of obscenity among the zealous. And who in these times dares not to be among the zealous?

Yet, how am I to tell the story of my life as a pet without using a pet’s language, without adopting his attitudes? Surely the time must come to an end when every politician and philosopher must conceal himself behind the mask of a bare-bones, know-nothing prose. And am I then required to tell White Fang’s story from the point of view of a Dingo? No! The memoirs of a member of Louis XVI’s court could not be set down in the rough accents of a sansculotte—and I must be allowed to write of White Fang as White Fang would have written of himself. For the time being, let us leave Dennis White in abeyance—and let me say, without more preamble, that as a puppy I was uncommonly happy.

How could it have been otherwise? I was raised in the best kennels of the Solar System. My young body was sportive, and so it sported. My education ranged freely through the full scope of human knowledge, and yet I was never forced beyond my inclinations. I enjoyed the company of my own kind as well as the inestimable pleasures of the Leash. Lastly, I was conscious from earliest childhood of possessing the finest pedigree. My father Tennyson White was a major artist, perhaps the major artist, in a society that valued art above all things else. No little bit of that glory rubbed off on his bloodline. Later, in adolescence, a father’s fame may cramp the expanding ego, but then it was enough to know that one was as valuable a pet as there could be. It made me feel secure. In what else does happiness consist than in this: a sense of one’s own value? Not in freedom, surely. For I have known that state, oh very well, and I can assure you that it is far less happy. Had I been free in my childhood, I would almost certainly have been wretched.

Actually, when I speak of my childhood as being so idyllic, I refer chiefly to my first seven years, for shortly after my seventh birthday I was orphaned—that is to say, the Dingoes made away with my father, while Motherlove simply committed Pluto and myself to care of the Shroeder Kennel and vanished into outer space. Thus even at the age of seven I might have been said to be free, and it was a condition I bitterly resented, thinking of it simply as neglect. Now, of course, I can see that the Shroeder Kennel, by contrast to what we call “the human condition”, is truly Paradise. Then I only had the moons of Jupiter to judge by. But I see I am making something of a jumble of this. Perhaps it would be better to set about this in a more chronological fashion.

Let me make a narrative of this.

To begin my life with the beginning of my life, as David Copperfield does, I record that I was born on a Sunday afternoon in the year of Our Lord 2017, on Ganymede, the fourth moon of Jupiter. At my father’s behest a gigantic thunderclap accompanied my birth, attended with quite a smart display of meteors and artificial comets. These natural wonders were succeeded by a Masque written by my father and set to a reconstituted Vivaldi cantata, in which various of the bitches of the kennel took the parts of my fairy godmothers. The eleven fairies portrayed were Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, and Clean. Each presented me with a little token emblematic of the spiritual gift she was bequeathing to me, but my father had somehow neglected to invite the twelfth fairy, Reverence, with fateful consequences for my character.

In speaking of my “earliest memories”, I encounter difficulties, for I cannot be sure at this late date which of my seeming memories are indeed mine and which are borrowed from Motherlove, Pluto, or whichever other brain my Master may have happened to pick for me. For instance, I have a distinct recollection of Daddy (excuse me, but that is the name I know him by; he has no other) looking yearningly into my eyes as he declaimed a poem, which I also remember clearly though I dare not here repeat it. I think it is one of the Earl of Rochester’s. Daddy is wearing a shirt in the Byronic style, with billowing sleeves and a soft, expansive collar. His tights are of black velvet, with silver piping. His thin hair, blonde almost to whiteness, hangs down to his shoulders. His eyes are the deep blue of a Martian sky, and their blue is heightened by contrast to the extreme pallor of his skin. Like his use of clothes and his broad A, the pallor is sheer affectation. He might have been tan for the asking.

Now surely this is not my memory. Perhaps it is Motherlove’s, though she claimed, when I recited the poem for her, that she’d never heard such a thing in her life (attempting all the while not to giggle). It could have been the memory of any of a dozen bitches on Ganymede, for since Daddy was the kennel’s prize possession he was encouraged to bestow his favors liberally. From the number of pedigreed descendants who could legitimately claim paternity from him it seems evident that Daddy cooperated with this policy. I have never met (and now I never shall meet) all my half-brothers and half-sisters.

Another memory that is more likely to have been mine is of Daddy from a vantage point of about three feet from the ground. He is conventionally nude this time and laughing to bust a gut. I can’t remember the joke. This must have been one of my last memories of him, for behind him I can make out the vivid green of a Terran meadow and the light that plays across his body can only be the light of the sun as it shines on our home planet, no more nor less. Even foreshortened I can see that Daddy had then the body of an athlete—but so had everyone else under the Mastery. Daddy was really quite modest in his somatic tastes, tending toward the Cellini side of the scale, while the majority favored a more Michelangelesque style.

Of my mother, Clea Melbourne Clift, I have more memories but none so distinct. She had a type of classic handsomeness over which time could not exercise his cruel authority: a noble brow; an unimpeachable nose; lips that might have been sculpted of marble, so perfect was their articulation. Indeed, from the tip of her toe to the highest-piled lock of her perfectly composed hair, there was something about Clea Clift that suggested the work of a stonemason. Clea was such a stickler for form. She always wanted me and Pluto to call her “Clea” or better, “Miss Clift”, and would become incensed if we ventured to use, in moments of unconsidered fondness, the simpler “Mom”, or Daddy’s slightly joking “Motherlove”. Had we been French, I daresay she would have insisted upon the formal vous and forbidden the familiar tu. Like so many women of her generation, the first to grow up under the Mastery, Clea was something of a bluestocking and very jealous of her independence. For Clea to have married and taken on the name of White, renowned though that name was and proud as she might be otherwise to be associated with it, would have been in contradiction to the first article of her faith: the sexes must be equal in all things.

Pluto and I didn’t know quite how we were to behave around Clea. She didn’t want us to think of her as a mother, but more as a sort of friend of the family. A distant friend. She interested herself but little in our education, limiting her attentions to serving us up with little snippets of history and culture-lore. The legend of van Gogh’s ear seemed to possess a special attraction to her for some reason, and she related it to me in my comfy force-field gravity-pulse cradle in a dozen variant forms, in which, successively, the character of van Gogh himself grew more and more peripheral while that of his “girlfriend” became of central importance. All I can recall of van Gogh’s girlfriend now, however, was that she had, like Motherlove, a classic nose and the ability to drive men mad with love.

It was Clea’s distinction to have been the first puppy born on Ganymede, which was at that time and for decades after the premier kennel of the Solar System. Daddy only came to Ganymede after the success of his novel, A Dog’s Life, when he was thirty-three years old. Daddy says that at first Clea Melbourne Clift would have nothing to do with him. Only when it appeared that his literary reputation was not to wane after a season of notoriety, and more important, that Clea’s aloofness had served only to open up the field to candidates who would otherwise have stood little chance against Clea’s superior charms—only then did she relent. Too late. A month sooner, and she might have constrained Daddy to monogamy, as he had sometimes offered; as it was, she was lucky to win the position of “first wife”. Their romance resembled that of Romeo and Juliet, in the respect that the lovers’ misfortunes arose from their having failed, by ever so small a margin, to synchronize their watches.

From the very first they quarreled. I can remember in particular one night (a very crucial one for this tale, for it was the night upon which its narrator was conceived) when the several causes of their rupture had come to a head all at once. Daddy had been taking his duties as a stud more seriously than usual and was consequently not giving Clea all the attention she felt was her due. Moreover, he had happened to make disparaging remarks upon Clea’s interpretation of some Schubert Lieder. (Have I mentioned that Clea was a singer? No? Then let me at once make it clear that her voice was not her prime attraction, or—for Daddy—any at all.)

Throughout the argument I seem to see Clea’s lovely face—usually a delicate tint of rose, but now flushed an angry red—so I presume that this memory originated in Daddy’s mind; certainly its timbre, the pervading irony, the sense that everything he says is “in quotes”, is his. But perhaps the whole scene is no more than a transparently Oedipal dream disguising itself as a borrowed “memory”. Or worse, what if truth and fancy, event and wish, have become inextricably tangled, beyond the power of even a Tiresias to unknot them?

Well then, I must use a sword and just hack away…

The scent of jasmine. The smoothness of Clea’s skin beneath my hand. Everything bathed in the pink glow of a desert twilight. “Now, Clea,” I can hear my voice saying, “we’ve been through all this before. I have to do these things for the sake of the kennel—to keep the standard up. You can understand that. Why—it should make you proud.”

She moves away and veils her beauty, like a startled squid, in sworls of inky mist. “Bother the kennel!” she whines. “If you really loved me as much as you say, you wouldn’t want to be off every night…”

“That’s just it, Clea my loveliest bitch, I don’t want to be away from you. But it’s my duty, my vocation.”

“And tonight, just because our Master’s given you the go-ahead…”

“Isn’t that a good reason? Don’t you want another son?”

“But…”

“And don’t you want the very best possible son [Meaning me] that you can possibly have? Well then, Clea my lovely, tonight’s the night. Be reasonable, darling.”

“Oh, reason!” she says, with highest disdain. “You’ll always be right, if you use reason as an argument. But already the black mists about her were beginning to disperse.

“If you won’t be persuaded logically, let me show you what I mean.” Daddy’s mind calls for its Master, and in the same instant the meshes of the Leash close around his and Clea’s mind, linking them in telepathic bondage. Argument is no longer possible; reason is subdued; only the Vision persists, and that Vision is of me, of White Fang, the son who will be theirs, the form potential in the chromosomatic patterns that their Master, a renowned breeder, had selected from the trillions of possible permutations and combinations available to him during the several months past.

I must say it is a good likeness, this Vision. The face is mine as surely as the one I see every day in my bathroom mirror. Truly, I am now missing one or two of the teeth that the model White Fang flashes in a smile, and I have a little scar on my left cheek (it is only evident when I blush) which the prophecy did not include. But these discrepancies are the work of environment, not heredity. The body is as excellently put together as one might hope, though here again environment has been making itself felt (I eat too much). Splendid hind quarters and a handsome torso. The head is smallish, according to the classic prescription, but well compact with intelligence for all that. And of course, a flawless character: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly…

“Oh, all right,” Clea sighs.

I—or rather, Daddy—kisses her, and there I had better bring this particular reminiscence to an end.

Of my first visit to Earth in 2024 I have only the fuzziest recollection, for here I must fall back on my own mnemonic resources. My chief impression seems to have been of sunlight, the authentic, inimitable sunlight of Earth. Organs that have evolved under particular conditions will naturally be most comfortable where those conditions obtain, and thus no substitute, however artful, can provide just those balances of color and intensity, those alternations of night and day, summer and winter, hazy and clear, that our very cells will recognize, demand, and crave. Though born on Ganymede, I knew from the first that Earth was my home.

But I did not like it. In this certainly I was influenced by the example of my Motherlove, for whom every day away from the civilized life of Jupiter was a torment of boredom. “There is nothing to do,” she would lament, when Daddy had returned from his afternoon jaunts about the countryside. “There’s nothing to see, and nothing to listen to. I’m going out of my mind.”

“It won’t be much longer now, Clea my loveliest. Besides, this is good for you. Being out here in the country, off your Leash and on your own, develops self-reliance and initiative.

“—self-reliance and initiative!” Clea said with a stamp of her gold-slippered foot. “I want my Leash. But it’s not me I’m worried about. It’s the boys. It’s been weeks since White Fang and Pluto have had any lessons. They’re running around these woods like a couple of wild Indians. Like Dingoes! What if they were captured! They’d be eaten alive.”

“Nonsense. You’d think this were Borneo or Cuba, the way you go on. There aren’t any Dingoes in the United States of America in the year 2024. This is a civilized country.”

“What about those people you said you met the other day—what was their name? The Nelsons. They were Dingoes.”

“They were just poor honest country folk trying to scratch a living out of the dirt. Once you get through to them, they’re very friendly.”

“I think it’s disgusting!” Clea said, stretching out in the little gravity-pocket of the Prefab that our Master had left behind so that we would not be utterly without the amenities. “Talking with them. Eating their dirty food. You could catch a disease.”

“Then I’d call up the Shroeder Kennel and be cured. Really, this part of Minnesota is just as civilized as anything on Ganymede. I like it here. If I had my way…”

“If you had your way, we’d all become Dingoes! The Shroeder Kennel—don’t talk to me about the Shroeder Kennel! Have you been there? Have you seen the way the pets are treated on Earth?”

“Not to the Shroeder Kennel exactly, but…”

“Well, I have, and I can tell you it’s barbaric. Those poor pets live like animals. It’s like something before the Mastery. They all run around unleashed, in this awful sunlight, out-of-doors, among all these loathsome vegetables…”

“It’s only grass, my love.”

“It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting to want to live here. Why you wanted to bring me and the children to this living hell, I’ll never comprehend.”

“I’ve explained to you a dozen times—my work requires it. I can’t even begin the sequel until I’ve recaptured the feeling of the place—the sense of being stranded here, of being without hope, of being mortal…”

Motherlove gave a little gasp of horror and covered her ears. The idea of mortality—even the word—was too depressing. She went to the medicine dispenser and dialed for a skyrocket, a mildly euphoric beverage derived from LSD. In a little while she was hallucinating happily in her own little pocket of gravity. Pluto and I wanted some drugs too, but Daddy promised us he’d read us a chapter from A Dog’s Life instead.

My father Tennyson White belonged to the first generation of humans to grow up away from the planet Earth. Born in 1980, just ten years after the first manifestations, Daddy had been abandoned on the steps of a power station. His first Master had been more interested in botanical specimens than in caring for foundlings, and so his early education had been erratic. Even so, it was such an education as no human had ever had before—with the possible exception of John Stuart Mill—and one feels that Mill did pay a rather steep price for his education. But with a Master assisting, one can be as polymathematical as one would like. Language and science, music and gymnastics—anything that requires more of competence and familiarity than of creative insight—can become “second nature” with no more effort than it would take to read a novel by, for instance, George Eliot.

At the age of three Daddy was sold or traded or somehow exchanged (just how the Masters arrange these matters among themselves none of their pets have ever been given to understand; when asked, the Masters make an analogy to the gold standard—but who has ever understood the gold standard?) and transported to the asteroid Ceres, where his abilities were cultivated to the full by one of the first truly great breeders. In fact, it was largely due to the successes of the Master of Ceres that the study and breeding of homo sapiens gradually usurped the attention of all Masters involved in Terran problems. Whether we are to be grateful to the Master of Ceres for this is not within my province to judge. I only wish to make it clear that, from the age of three to the age of twenty, Daddy could not have wanted a better Master or more thorough cultivation.

Then at the age of twenty it was discovered that Daddy had leukemia. Though it was easily within the competence of his Master to have cured him of this wasting disease (what was not within their competence, after all?), nothing was done. As his Master explained to Daddy, as he lay there in his sickbed, it was considered unsporting to tamper with basic genetic materials, as any permanent cure would have required. Daddy protested and was assured that his case was being debated in the highest councils of the Mastery, but that it would be an indeterminate time before any decision could be reached. Meanwhile Daddy was shipped back to Earth, much as a piece of inferior merchandise might be returned to the factory. There, in an inferior, overpopulated, and understaffed hospital in Northeastern Minnesota, haunted by the knowledge that his life or death was nothing but a sporting proposition to the Masters, he conceived of his great novel, A Dog’s Life. He began writing it the same day his Master announced to him that his leukemia was going to be cured and that he would be allowed to return to his home on Ceres.

A Dog’s Life was an epoch-making book—like Luther’s Bible, or Das Kapital, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even the Masters read and admired it. Tennyson White received the Nobel Prize, was elected to the French Academy, and was the first man to hold two seats in the American Congress—he was the senior senator from Arizona and the representative from the Ninth District in Minnesota. More than any other person, it was he who effected the reconciliation of men and their Masters. And it was just for that reason that the Dingoes—the small element of the population that still resisted the sovereignty of the Master—had marked him for vengeance. It was from A Dog’s Life, in fact, that they had taken their name.

The wonder of that novel is that it’s told entirely from a dog’s point of view—a real dog, a canine of the Industrial Revolution. The realistic surface is never distorted by the demands of the allegory, and yet… And yet, no one has ever surpassed Daddy in depicting their essential and unfathomable alienness. As Woof to Mr Manglesnatch, so man to his Master. The analogy is almost infinitely extensible.

Before A Dog’s Life, the Dingoes (this is still the most convenient name to use when discussing the various dissident elements prior to 2037, for though they went by any number of names—Republicans, Baptists, Harvard Club, B’nai B’rith, etc.—they never could come together on a good brand name to sell revolution) had used such words as “kennel”, “leash” and even “pet” as invectives. Daddy’s book rather turned the tables. It gave them the old one-two-transvaluation-of-all-values-sockeroo punch, as it were. Thus, it became a point of pride to be a pet; to be domesticated was self-evidently a superior state than to be wild. One has only to observe the difference between a greyhound and a wolf, a clever dachshund and a vulgar Dingo, to see why the Masters are innately our… Masters.

There were other, more trifling consequences of the book’s vogue. Everyone who read it, everyone who was anyone, began to name his children after famous dogs. There hasn’t been a generation of puppies with stranger names since the Pilgrim Fathers went off the deep end back in the seventeenth century. To mention only those who have gone on to win fame on their own: Ladadog, Bobby Greyfriars, Little Sheba, Rintintin, Beautiful Joe, Snoopy and See Spot Run.

The reason that Daddy had returned to Earth yet once again, despite the unhappy associations one would have expected him to have from his last sojourn there, was that after a slight hiatus he was at work on a new novel that was to be a sequel to A Dog’s Life. His work proceeded in absolute privacy, a privacy that even in the most self-transcendent moments of being Leashed he would not allow his Master to intrude upon. For this would have been to cast doubt upon the value of the work as an authentic human creation.

The days of his research project passed into weeks, the weeks into months. Motherlove grew more and more vocal in her boredom, and since Daddy was not usually about during the day for her to complain to, it fell upon Pluto and myself to bear witness to her wrongs and play endless rubbers of three-handed bridge with her. It was not a very gratifying occupation for two boys our age (I was seven; Pluto, ten), and we tried to be out of her way whenever possible. We spent the daylight hours roaming the woods and exploring the innumerable lakeshores and riverbanks of the area. It was impossible to get lost, for we had a homing device that could instruct us how to retrace our every step. We observed none of the cautions that Motherlove was always inventing for us, and I’m sure that if we had been lucky enough to meet any Dingo children we would have been delighted to befriend them and join their wild games. Pluto and I were quite sick of each other by this time. Partly it was the difference in age; partly the isolation (in two months almost anyone becomes unendurable). I also think that a fundamental antipathy between Pluto and myself extends right down to the core of our pineal glands (which organ, Descartes tells us, is the residence of the soul).

And so it came about quite naturally that it should be Pluto and I who discovered the car—his late-vintage Volkswagen—overturned and just beginning to smolder as we got there. The windshield was shattered into opacity with buckshot, and the driver’s seat was dark with blood. Even as we watched the automobile caught fire, and we had to back away.

It did not take a woodsman to follow the spoor of Daddy’s blood to the edge of the forest. Apparently he was still alive then, for there are evidences of a struggle all along the path into the wood. Once or twice we called his name aloud, but the woods remained as silent as death. Is there a better analogy?

It was another day before the search party from Shroeder Kennel found the traces of the pyre. The ashes were scattered all about the meadow. The Master of the Shroeder Kennel identified the bloodstains on the edge of the clearing as Daddy’s and Daddy’s alone, and the ear that they found nailed to the oak tree was likewise identified beyond the shadow of a doubt. The severed ear was given to Clea. It was perhaps exactly what she’d always wanted of Daddy. She had a special locket made to contain it—a sort of reliquary.

As for the bulk of him, one could assume that the Dingoes would have been thorough in disposing of the remains. It was popularly believed (and I’m not sure myself that it isn’t true) that the Masters could have resurrected a body from utter hamburger.

A monument was built to him on the site of the murder. It was a statue of Woof and Mr Manglesnatch. Beneath the bronze figures was a plaque with the inscription:

There was, as well, a quotation from his novel: “Ah, what bliss there is in servitude!” The monument was later disfigured by Dingoes in ways too hideous to be recalled.