The Puppies Of Terra

Chapter Two
In which I am neglected shamefully by my Master, and I bloody my brother’s nose.

The Masters: let me say a few words about the Masters.

Perhaps my dear readers will tell me that there is no need for me to put in my two-cents’ worth on a topic so threadbare and tired as the Mastery. It is considered good form these days to leave the subject alone, just as in the third and fourth centuries A.D. one did not bring up the subject of the Trinity with strangers. Whether the Son was of one substance with the Father, or of like substance, or perhaps of only similar substance was a matter best left to each man’s private conscience. The analogy extends farther than I first intended, for the Masters were our gods and though now their altars have been overturned, there is still something a little holy (or unholy, which is almost the same thing) about their empty shrines and temples. When gods die, they become demons and are then, if anything, more troublesome than before.

But since most of the figures involved in the present controversies on the essential nature of the Masters had not had the benefit, as I have, of direct experience of them, I can justly claim a sort of apostolic authority—a distinction that few of the controversialists will begrudge me, I am sure.

As nearly as we can know them, the Masters can be said to be a pure electromagnetic phenomenon—formed of a “substance” that cannot be called either “matter” or “energy” but which nonetheless displays a potentiality for either. No, that isn’t quite right, since I’ve not mentioned the neutrino. The neutrino is a sub-atomic particle that has a mass of 0, a charge of 0, and a spin of +½. Well, the Masters, according to the best authority (theirs), can be identified more or less exactly (it depends on a few other things) with that spin.

As a direct consequence of these wonderful properties, the power of the Masters approached (should I not rather say “approaches”?) cosmic proportions, and their knowledge approached omniscience. They were not quite infinite, but then what is? Considered simply as a field of force (or as a potentiality for such) they were, corporately, of a scope and dimension equal at least to the magnetic field of the Earth. Beside them mankind is insignificant and laughable—or so it often seemed in those days. Like Jehovah in his earlier, more anthropomorphic days, it was no problem at all for them to take over the management of Earth from us. They were, if not altogether omnipotent, potent enough for all our purposes and, presumably, for most of theirs.

In the strictest sense of the word, the Masters were unaccountable. One could only accept them, reverence them, and hope for the best.

The best that one could hope for was the Leash. Despite the hundreds of volumes written about it, the Leash has always eluded description: the tides of knowledge that sweep through the mind; the sense of being in communion with the most transcendental forces, of being a spoke from the hub about which the universe is spinning; the total certainty that it affords; the ecstasy and the consuming love. Naturally it didn’t always reach those proportions. Sometimes it was no more than a mild, diffuse sense of well-being—just the absence of anxiety. But if the Leash had never been more than a tranquilizer it could never have bound man as firmly as it did and made him love his servitude.

What was the Leash then, in fact?

First let me say what it was not. It was not a “telepathic link” with the Masters, any more than the tug of a leather leash on the jeweled collar of a poodle is speech. It was the Masters’ means of communicating with us, truly—but they could communicate no more to us than our minds were capable of receiving, and I can assure you that the depths of the Masters will never be fathomed by even the best of our divers.

The Leash was simply their touch. Those floods of ecstasy it brought were nothing more than the Masters’ way of tugging on our collar. A touch of their hand could transmute a human nervous system from gross lead to gleaming gold, or scramble a brain into idiocy with, literally, the speed of lightning, but it could not, without changing the nature of the beast, make a man something he was not. They could not, in short, raise us up to their own level.

Desirable as the Leash was, one could not coerce it. Like the state of grace, it came as a gift or not at all. How often a pet was Leashed and the intensity of the bond depended upon the whim or good will of one’s master. And here I must clear up another popular misconception: all Masters are not alike. They have discrete and individual personalities, as any pet who has had more than a single Master can tell you. Some of them seemed to be deeply concerned for their pets’ well-being. (How large this interest loomed in the whole framework of any Master’s life can never be known, for all that a pet can know about his Master is what sort of interest he takes in pets.) Others simply put them into a kennel and let them languish there, scarcely ever bothering to Leash them and put them through their paces. Such a master was the Master of the Shroeder Kennel.

Pluto and I were placed in the Shroeder Kennel within a week of our father’s assassination. Clea told us that it would be only for a little while and then she would be back for us. Perhaps she meant it, but I have always felt that her deed was very much on a par with that of Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother. Clea surely knew the sort of place the Shroeder Kennel was, for we had heard her complain about it to our poor father. Daddy, we were sure, would never have left us in such a joyless place. But Clea, now that Daddy was out of the picture, now that the glamor was gone, simply didn’t give a damn for the two puppies he had given her.

In a purely physical sense, we were well cared for, I’ll grant that. The Shroeder Kennel (named for a little town that had once occupied that site, of which it had been said, in the days before the Mastery, that you could throw a frozen turd from one end of town to the other without much experience as a pitcher) had an excellent gymnasium, warm and cold pools, indoor tennis and golf courses, good robotic instruction in all sports, and the kennel rations were prepared with that exquisite simplicity that only the most refined tastes can command. Our rooms, both public and private, were spacious, airy, and bright. The central architectural feature of the Kennel, the jewel for which all else was but the setting, was a reconstruction, perfect in every detail, of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City. (Why? I have always wondered. Why that? Why not Notre Dame, Salisbury, the Frauenkirche?) The reconstituted cathedral was set amid acres of English landscape gardening and playing fields. Naturalness was everywhere the style of the thing, and it was no less natural for being adjusted, indoors and outdoors alike, to our convenience. Thus, in the summer the air was filtered and cooled, and in the winter the dome that encompassed the kennel heated us and added extra hours of sunlight and warmth to the brief northern days. The dome delimiting the kennel was fully a mile in diameter, and within its bounds our comforts were secure against the enmity of the Dingoes.

It would have been an ideal existence—if only our Master had truly cared for us.

Motherlove left us at the gate of the Shroeder Kennel at sunset of an autumn afternoon. Outside the dome, the ground was sere and the tree branches already denuded; within, the grass was a perpetual midsummer green, and though the leaves of the trees still crimsoned and fell, they did so in graceful sequence so that there was never a preponderance of decay. Motherlove blew us a parting kiss; then, wreathed in baroque spires of golden light, like an irradiated Bernini Madonna, she ascended into the clear blue sky of October. As her figure diminished to a pinpoint and vanished, we felt our Leashes fall away (for no Master’s influence can extend beyond a dozen or so miles) and our minds stood naked in an alien world—a world that, having just been the scene of our father’s bloody death, we could not suppose to be friendly.

In the middle distance we could make out the spire of the cathedral, and, supposing it to be the administrative center, we made our way toward it along a neatly graveled path that circled a field where a gymnastic competition was in progress. Five youths were running pell-mell along a dirt track in a race so evenly contested that none of them could hold the lead more than a few meters at a time. A distance away other young men hurled the discus and javelin, while dispersed over the grass at regular intervals, like polka dots, pairs of wrestlers strained against each other, groaning with effort. Each of these gymnasts was blond, deeply-tanned, and constructed according to the specification that Michelangelo had developed for his “David”. Neither Pluto nor I were of a mind to disarrange so splendid a grouping of figures in a landscape by asking our way from them, any more than we would have thought to disturb a display of china figurines on the mantel of a house we were visiting for the first time. We pressed on cheerlessly to St John’s.

The Master of Ganymede from whom Pluto and I had received our earliest education had not been an enthusiastic archaeologist, so there had been few reconstructions on Ganymede other than of a purely utilitarian sort—a scaled-down version of Hampton Court, a couple of Palladian villas, that sort of thing. Nothing monumental. Our first impression of St John the Divine was out of proportion, therefore, to anything but its proportions. It is a vulgar building, but it is an incredibly big building. With my chin hanging slack and my heart pumping at double-time, I stretched out my hand to touch the torus at the base of one of the gigantic columns at the rear of the nave. It was cool and tingly, reminding me that what here seemed to be stone was in fact much less substantial: an immensely strong force-field with a skin of matter only one molecule thick. It was this stagey method of construction (let me assure you, though, that the illusion was perfect, the stagecraft consummate) that made “Architecture” a matter of such indifference to the Masters. Under such conditions munificence was taken for granted, and taste became the sole consideration.

Though it was empty, there was something about the cathedral that made Pluto and me wish to stay there. The sheer magnitude of the place seemed to put our little problems into perspective. What could we possibly matter beneath a ceiling as high as all that? It is the size of the gods, and nothing else, that endears them to their worshippers. The best god is simply the biggest.

(Forgive me, dear reader, these little wanderings from the true path of narrative. Theology is my special vice, but I must learn to keep a tighter rein on it.)

Shortly after we had entered the cathedral, a solitary worshipper came in behind us: a young lady of indeterminate age (I would have guessed eighteen, and I would have been wrong), wearing clothes of a most improbable cut, and a complexion so white that a geisha might have envied her. She blessed herself at the front, then walked down the center aisle with such a deal of swaying and unsteadiness that one feared, despite the voluminous base provided by her hoop skirt, that she would topple at every step. Her black hair was done up in an artful and complicated style and was surmounted by a bonnet of even greater complications—a construction of cloth, flowers, jewels, and papier-mâché that seemed to vie with the high altar for the attention of the faithful. It seemed a shame that there was no one but Pluto and myself present to admire it. When this mirror of fashion had reached the foremost pew of the nave, she genuflected (I thought she had really toppled then), entered, and knelt in an attitude of devotion, reading from a little black book she had taken from her reticule.

We approached respectfully, wondering if it was right to come into such a building unclothed. It was my first intimation of guilt, and I did not like it.

Pluto reached a timid hand out to pull at her puffy sleeve for attention, and the woman (one could see she was not such a young lady after all) turned a cold eye upon us. “What is it? Can’t you see I’m reading? Why don’t you go bother a robot? That’s what they’re for. Well, don’t just stand there gaping. What is it you want? Speak up!”

“Please, Miss,” Pluto stammered, “we’re the new puppies, and we don’t know where to go.”

“Go to a robot, of course. Do I look like a robot? Does this” (gesturing with her little black book at the vasty spaces of the cathedral) “look like a schoolroom?”

“Could you take us to a robot, please? Because we’re lost, you know.”

“Bother!” the woman exclaimed.

From the first, you can see, there was something daunting about Roxanna Proust, as though the very melancholy in which she wrapped herself up were an actively aggressive force. She was at almost all times steeped in emotion. She didn’t seem to care what flavor it was either, just as long as she got lots of it. Even before we had interrupted her, she had been crying into her book, and, as she scolded us, there were still two tears trembling in the corners of her dark eyes. The skin thereabouts was scrunched into a great delta of wrinkles, as though from the pressure of squeezing out the tears. She had a prominent nose in profile, with a good cutting edge to it, and a small, slightly recessed chin that would tremble in moments of stress; that is, usually. She wore quantities of jewelry, especially rings, with the idea that an opulence of ornament would compensate for the general spareness of her own person. Yet for all this, she did give one the impression of a sort of beauty, a rare and highly frangible sort.

Pluto broke under the pressure and began crying… not, I suspect, without a certain childish cunning. “B-but we’re lost! We’re orphans. We’re all alone!”

Roxanna’s delta of wrinkles narrowed under the pressure of a thought. “What did you say your names were?”

“My name’s Pluto, and he’s White Fang. He’s my little brother.”

“Your last name, child!”

“White.”

“Your father was Tennyson White? The Tennyson White?” Pluto nodded. Roxanna made a sound rather like a bird of prey swooping down on a field mouse. “You poor dear darlings!” Even as this cry echoed and reechoed in the cathedral vaults, Roxanna laid down her book and caught up Pluto and myself into the dark, ample folds of her dress, as if she were netting us. “Why didn’t you say so? Oh my little pets! My loves!”

With such endearments and as many others as she knew, she led Pluto and myself out of the cathedral. Only when we got to the bronze doors did she remember her little black book. She regarded the two of us a moment calculatingly, then pointed a heavily bejeweled forefinger at me: “You! Run back and fetch my book, will you? That’s a good dog.”

I was only too eager to please her and at the same time escape a little while from a presence that was, like a room in which a bottle of perfume has been broken, a little overpowering.

When I had found Roxanna’s book, I opened it to the title page out of curiosity and discovered it was not, as I had imagined, a prayerbook, but something in French that I’d never heard of called A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (Volume V: La Prisonnière) by somebody called Marcel Proust.

Aside from the robots and teaching machines that looked after us, it was chiefly Roxanna Proust who undertook the responsibility of our education. Faute de mieux. Tant pis. Roxanna taught us French, reading long passages to us from her favorite author (from whom she had appropriated her surname). Even now, when I wish, I can close my eyes and hear her voice again, shrill with didacticism: “Proust! Proust is the great spirit of our age! No one but Proust has seen so profoundly into the depths, the veritable abysses, of the human character. No one! Only Marcel Proust!” I sometimes wondered if she had read any other book in her life besides the Remembrance of Things Past. She taught us German by reading a German translation of Proust. She taught us the history of literature by comparing all other authors to Proust. (There was no comparison.) If she could have taught us mathematics by reading Proust, she would have done that too.

She despised all other novelists, with but one exception: Daddy. “He did have a certain degree of literary skill,” she had informed us shortly after our arrival. “I’m sure that if he had been able to continue, he would have learned to profit from Proust’s example.”

It is possible that Roxanna’s attentions were not entirely due to her selfless concern for the development of our literary taste. She was only too well aware that her talents were not widely appreciated at the Shroeder Kennel, where the emphasis was so much on athletics. She languished in the intellectual night of Shroeder, much as Chekhov’s Three Sisters languished in the provinces, always dreaming of that wonderful, never-to-be day when they would go to Moscow. Roxanna’s Moscow was the asteroids, and she was hopeful that Pluto and I, sons of the eminent Tennyson White, would get her there more readily than her own rather limited attainments and a pedigree she blushed even to mention. (Roxanna had been born on a nearby farm to a family with the unhappy name of Skunk.)

It was an eclectic education, but there was no one else about with even a fraction of Roxanna’s talent, special as it was. Most of the pets at Shroeder lived their lives between the gymnasium and the boudoir. For my own part, I’ll confess that I spent more time exercising and playing games than I did in the education booths or at Roxanna’s feet. Without the intellectual stimulation and aid of the Leash, literature has not been my natural inclination.

Pluto was different. Pluto loved to read, and he sucked right up to the Skunk Lady (as she was generally known at Shroeder). Under her guidance he began to write. Not surprisingly his first style (at age ten) was very derivative of Proust. The next year he began to sound more like Joyce, and by the time he was pushing thirteen he came into his own.

That was a red-letter day in Pluto’s life—the day he found his own style—and I remember how he came running across the playing field to drag me away from a rough session of gymnochess. I was a bit peeved, since White was winning, but I liked to humor Pluto in these things, since he had almost no other audience at Shroeder and I knew he was lonely.

He wouldn’t read Ceremony (the title of his work) to me out-of-doors, but insisted that I come to the Cathedral, which was empty every day but Sunday, the one day when our Master would gather his pets together and give them an hour on the Leash of full-pressure beatitude. Once in the cathedral, Pluto put on what he called “vestments”, oddments of clothing he scraped together from the theatrical wardrobes, and insisted I do the same.

“This is going to be a ceremony,” Pluto informed me in a whisper. “So you have to fold your hands together like this and not say anything till I’m done with it.” He lighted a candle and threw on a tape of organ fugues that sounded peculiarly hollow here, since the walls lacked the acoustical properities of real stone. Candle in hand, he marched up the steps to the pulpit in time to the music, where in an uneven adolescent baritone, he began to declaim from Ceremony.

“Ceremony. Part One: Worship of the Muse. First, an oration composed by Plutonium Keats White. Ahem! Art! Art is a thing of futile beauty. It has no part in our lives, or very little, and it is as unsuitable at moments of great stress as it is silly on occasions of state. It has an affinity to death. Its greatness is the greatness of a king resigned to his fate. It is defeatist. It is not the sort of thing you would inculcate in children, for”—and here he stared down at me in his gravest manner—“it might kill them in too large a dosage. Art is the way we delay our departure, but it is no way to start the day.”

He seemed to have finished, and I clapped—rather mildly, I’m afraid. “It’s nothing like Proust,” I assured him. “And I don’t think you could say Joyce influenced it very much either.”

“Quiet! That was only Part One. Part Two is called ‘The Sacrifice’, and for that part you have to get down on your knees and hold out your hands so I can tie them together.”

I laughed, thinking he was making a joke.

“On your knees, you little son of a bitch!” he screamed at me.

I cannot say what my reply was to this strange demand, except to suggest that I had first discovered the expression in a novel by J.D. Salinger.

It is difficult to say which of us was responsible for the fight. Pluto did come storming down from the pulpit in what was for him a berserker rage. He did strike the first blow. But all this while I continued to shout “(Salinger)!” at him, and he could claim to having been provoked.

Pluto was thirteen, I a mere ten; Pluto was quite five feet tall, I only a bit over four. But Pluto was a creampuff, and my three years of gymnastics made the contest almost even. He kicked and bit and flailed about and made some really splendid loud noises, but before I’d even warmed to the task he was in retreat. I managed to put a good rip in his foolish “vestment” and dyed it a noble red with the blood from his noble nose. At last he admitted that everything I’d said about him was true, and I let him get up from the floor.

He ran straight to the power station to signal our Master on the emergency switch, something no other pet had ever dared to do, since the Master of Shroeder didn’t like to be bothered. I am amazed—to this day I am amazed—that it was I who was punished and not Pluto. He started the fight.

A bloody nose! What is so dreadful about a bloody nose?

It was not a dire punishment. In some ways it was scarcely a punishment at all. It was just done to guarantee that I would be less inclined to shed blood in the future. I was conditioned, irrevocably, to respond to the sight of blood, be it ever so small a gout, with nausea and vomiting, succeeded by fainting. In all my years as a pet, my conditioning was never put to the test, but later there would be occasions, bloody occasions…

But I am getting ahead of myself. Everything in due order.