The Puppies Of Terra

Chapter Four
In which I am perfectly happy.

It was paradise. What more can I say?

Oh, I know that’s cheating. I know I have to try. But consider the immensity of the task; consider how many better men than I have tried and failed. Milton’s heaven is a bore; his Eden, though nice enough at first glance, has a deadly sameness about it. Dante did rather better, but even so most of his admirers find it more difficult to soar through his Empyrean than to climb the steep side of Purgatory or slough through Hell’s mires. On the whole, Heaven is best left in the hands of the gods.

Let me begin, then, with something easy, like geography…

Swan Lake was composed of twelve smallish asteroids, which our Master had artfully woven into a sort of celestial clockwork. The interwoven trajectories of the twelve asteroids had been determined with such niceness that the whole configuration—from twelve o’clock to twelve o’clock, as it were—came full circle once every hundred years. It was thereby possible with just a glance at the sky to determine the year, the month, the day of the week, and—within a few minutes—the hour, providing of course that one could remember the code. The largest of these asteroids, Tchaikovsky, was a scant ten miles in diameter, and the least, Milhaud, was a tawdry rock not five thousand feet from pole to pole. The main kennels and all permanent installations of any size were on Tchaikovsky, but any pet could travel freely to the other asteroids along broad slipstreams, or—if he was feelings his oats—just by jumping, since the gravity was a piddling •03 that of Earth anywhere outside the kennel proper. The kennels themselves were all gravitized at a comfortable •85 just as they had been at Shroeder.

Swan Lake, though done up in better taste than other kennels I have known, was built along the usual lines. The walls, the floors, all the elements of construction were force-fields wrapped in microscopically thin layers of stuff—atoms, molecules, that sort of thing. The only permanent feature in any room was a console that any pet knew how to operate. This console controlled temperature, humidity, wind velocity, illumination, fog effects, gravity and dimensions. The dimensional control was extremely complex, and only a professional architect of long experience (or a Master) knew all its ins and outs. Most of us contented ourselves with a selection from the thousand or so presettings: Louis Sixième, Barnyard, Dracula’s Castle, Whale-belly, Sahara, Seraglio Steamroom, etc. There was a special dial that controlled the degree of realism or stylization of any of these scenes, and one could produce some very uncanny effects by, for instance, demanding a totally abstract Bronx Renaissance living room or an ultra-realistic Pleistocene swamp. And the effects one could get by spinning the dial…!

No more! I can’t stand remembering these things. The happiness—

Stoicism, White Fang old boy, stoicism!

Actually, Julie and I spent most of our time out-of-doors, dashing in and out among the asteroids. The ten asteroids intermediate in size between Tchaikovsky and Milhaud were, in descending order: Stravinsky, Adam, Pugno, Prokofiev, Delibes, Chopin, Glazunov, Offenbach, Glière and Nabokov.

As my readers may have gathered from this list, the Master of Swan Lake was something of a balletomane. For each of his asteroids was named after a composer of notable music for the ballet—or, a slight but telling distinction, of music for notable ballets. In fact, all of Swan Lake had been fashioned, all the pets had been gathered there, to serve this single passion of our Master, which was, I hasten to add, our passion too, our entire purpose, and our highest happiness next to the Leash itself.

Oh, hell, I should never have started to try to explain! I might have known I’d end up like this, muttering dithyrambs.

I was explaining a little ways back, how Julie and I would go sailing out among the asteroids. Now such times as we did this, we were dancing. In fact all the time we were at Swan Lake, all those ten years, we never stopped dancing. And as we would soar past any one of the asteroids, our passage would trigger a recording—a miniaturized electronic orchestra, actually—that would play the single composition of that composer which most suited our velocity, trajectory, idiorhythmic motion, and mood. It could also improvise transitions from and to any piece of music in the repertoire of any of the other asteroids. These transitions were often the most amazing passages of all (imagine a collaboration between Offenbach and Stravinsky!), which encouraged us never to linger overlong in one vicinity but to be ever flitting about like will-o’-the-wisps.

There were other machines that served the same purpose as a crew of stagehands, managing the lights, providing props, laying scenes when the music demanded something more specific than fireworks…

And machines that released scents that were harmonized with the other elements synaesthetically…

Yes, and finally there was us—Julie and me and the other pets. The ensemble. It was on our account that Swan Lake had been put together, so that our revels never would be ended, so that we would have music wherever we’d go. I say we danced, but that will not convey to most of my readers just what we did. For the average Dingo, dancing is just an exercise preliminary to mating. It provides a release of certain powerful tensions along socially approved channels. When we danced, it was nothing so crude as that. Everything we did, everything a person could do, became part of our dance: our dinners, our lovemaking, our most secret thoughts, and our silliest jokes. The dance integrated all these disparate elements into an aesthetic whole; it ordered the randomness of life into immense tapestries. Not Art for Art’s Sake, but Life for Art’s Sake was our motto.

How am I to explain this to Dingoes? There was nothing wasted. I think that’s the important thing. Not a word or thought or glance between two persons but that there was a deeper meaning to it. It fit, just as in a piece of music that observes the canons each chord has its place in the melodic succession.

Here again was the old Romantic idea of a synthesis of the arts: the same that inspired Wagner’s Bayreuth or Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But the Master of Swan Lake had resources to accomplish what those men fumbled for—and his chief resource necessarily was his dearly beloved pets—us. He pampered us, he coddled us, he got us into trim. Not only physical trim (even the most negligent Master would see to that); more even than mental trim. In fact, too much acuity could be a disadvantage. Daddy’s Masters on Ceres and Ganymede had developed their pets’ intellects more than our Master altogether approved. There had always been something over-refined about that first generation of pets. Pope somewhere says of Shakespeare that he was an “unpolished diamond”. Well, what might not Shakespeare have said of Pope? The important thing, as we saw it, was not to be witty and cultivated and bright, but to be sincere. We of the second generation found our parents’ style dry, over-intellectual, unbecomingly ironic. We wanted to simplify, and since the material of our art was our own lives, we simplified ourselves. Like Young Werther, we cultivated a certain willful naïveté. Not only did we make a dance of our lives, but we turned the simplest statements—a “thank you” or a “by your leave”—into a sort of rhapsody.

It was certainly paradise, but what would not have been paradise with Darling, Julie there? It is nice to have a Master, but it is necessary to have a mate—as Woof observes somewhere in A Dog’s Life.

How to speak of her? Putting Julie “into words” is like sculpting in quicksilver. There was nothing constant about her, nothing you could call hers. The color of her hair changed from day to day; her eyes were blue or brown or hazel, as the mood came upon her; her figure might be lithe as a nymphette or buxom as a Rubens. It all depended on the rôle she had to play.

For Julie essentially was an actress. I have seen her dance the major rôles in the classical repertoire; I have seen her improvise; when I’ve been Leashed with her I’ve looked into the furthest recesses of her charming mind. And never have I glimpsed even a hint of the real, the quintessential Julie—unless it was an infinite capacity for pretending. She was Juliet and Lucrezia Borgia in equal measure; she was both acts of Giselle; she was Odette and Odile, the black swan and the white swan too. She was whoever it might occur to her that she might be. And she was lovely.

We were only sixteen, Julie and I, when our first child was born to us. The High Mass that celebrated Petite’s christening was based on the standard Roman model and set, sweetly, to Mother Goose melodies. My brother Pluto officiated at the ceremony and delivered a sermon in verse of his own composition in honor of the occasion. Since all of us present at the ceremony were in telepathic rapport with him, our appreciation of the sermon was equal exactly to Pluto’s (who admired it greatly), but I have had a chance recently to reexamine his verses with more dispassion, and I wonder…

But let my readers judge for themselves. The following is Pluto’s sermon in its entirety. It is meant to be read under bright lights with a slight scent of musk, as of a diaper pail opened briefly in the nearby room. Like most work he was turning out at that time, it should be delivered in a loud voice with something of a Gregorian chant:

Considering that this was how our little Petite got her start in life, I think she’s done pretty well.

I should explain at once, since the subject has intruded itself here, that there was nothing promiscuous about Swan Lake. The hearth was sacred to us, the marriage bed a shrine. In this we differed from the cynical libertinism of our forebears—not through any want of libido, but really from an excess of it. For us monogamy was a continually passionate state. Anything else would have been less. Moreover, our Master did have fixed ideas on the subject of organic breeding (as he called it), and perhaps he sometimes assisted our natural inclination to monogamy by weeding out adulterous thoughts from our minds’ neat gardens in order to further these policies of his and, incidentally, to keep the prices up.

It may be, as contemporary critics have suggested, that the New Domesticity of the Twenties and Thirties was a highly artificial condition—a fashion if not merely a fad. But cannot the same charge be brought against Victorian sentimentality? Against the Moslem purdah? Against all institutions whatever? The difference between a folkway and a fashion is one of degree, not of kind.

What I mean to establish by all this is the simple fact that though we lived in Swan Lake ten years, we were always true to each other, Julie to me and me to Darling, Julie. And if anyone ever dares insinuate anything to the contrary, he will have to answer to me for it—and I shall accept no answer slighter than the forfeit of his life.

It was paradise.

Really, my dear readers, it was almost paradise. Illness and pain were banished from our lives, and it may have been (for I know of no instances to disprove it) that so long as we stayed Leashed, death too had lost its sting. Women no longer brought forth children in sorrow, nor did men eat their bread salted by the sweat of their brows. Our happiness did not degenerate into boredom, and our pleasures were never dampened by an aftertaste of guilt.

Paradise has a considerable flaw, however, from the narrative point of view. It is anti-dramatic. Perfection doesn’t make a good yarn, because it doesn’t have to go anywhere. Perfection is happy right where it is. So there isn’t much for me to tell you about Swan Lake, except: I liked it.

I liked it; for ten years that was the story of my life.

And so here we are in the year 2037 already, time having flown. By angle of declination between Glazunov and Chopin I can see that it was August. We were in a large marble courtyard, where Julie was teaching four-year-old Petite to pirouette. The sky flickered violently, and an obbligato of hunting horns announced visitors from outer space. At the console, I called up a triumphal arch from the willing ground so that our guests might enter in style. I turned the gravity up to a more formal 1.05, and poor little Petite went into a tailspin and plopped down to the floor, dismayed and giggling.

The horns quieted, and an anguished metallic din split the air, as of an anvil being struck—but no, it was only a pet striding forward through the arch. He wore armor in the Attic manner, very leathery and crusted with gauds, and his face was hidden behind a grotesque iron mask. Gaily waving a mace-and-chain, he shouted his greeting aloud to us above the anvil-clangor of his footsteps: “Hoi-ho! Hoi-ho!” The richness of his perfect Heldentenor voice made the ringing of the anvils seem the merest trill of violins. Only a few feet away from us he released the mace-and-chain, which went spinning straight up over our heads and at the top of its arc burst into fireworks, at which instant our visitor gripped my forearm with his right hand. A gesture I would have reciprocated, except that the casing of leather and iron about his massive wrist was too thick to afford me any sort of purchase. With his free hand he doffed the iron helmet and peering up (for as we stood, toe to toe, my eyes were at the level of the Medusa graven on his breastplate) I could behold the blond hair and the blue eyes of Wagner’s Seigfried.

“Hi there!” I said friendlily. Darling, Julie echoed my greeting, while Petite, ever the show-off, tried to execute another pirouette under 1.05 gravity and fell on her inevitable ass.

“I am St Bernard of Titan,” the visitor said, rending the air. “All just and godly men are my friends, but villains tremble at my name.”

“I’m glad to hear it. My name is White Fang, and this is my wife—Darling, Julie, and that at your feet is our daughter Petite. We all bid you welcome to Swan Lake, St Bernard.”

Now a softer music filled the air (the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser, I believe) and St Bernard, turning to face the arch, lowered himself reverently to one knee. A shimmering golden light formed in the center of the arch, and within this lambency, like a diamond set in a gold chalice, appeared a woman of beauty to rival the gods’.

My mother.

“Motherlove!” I exclaimed. “That is to say—Clea! What a surprise!”

“Yes, isn’t it? How long has it been now? Thirteen years? Fourteen? You’re not even a puppy any more—and who is this?” (It was Petite, who was shyly bent double and peering at Clea through the archway of her legs.) “Am I a grandmother! Fancy that! You’d never know by looking at me, would you? I still look as young as on the day your father first met me.”

Though this was true, the years had not been without their effect in other ways. Certain tics of character had reached a mature growth, chiefly an unawareness of other people that bordered on autism. Thus, she breezed right on with her soliloquy, oblivious of my attempts to introduce Julie to her.

“And speaking of your father, I assume you’ve already met my new companion?” By the solicitous manner in which she laid her hand on St Bernard’s leathern thigh, she robbed that “companion” of whatever sense it might have had of the euphemistic. “It was he who insisted that we stop by at Swan Lake. I was reluctant, since it is hardly a major attraction. Nothing on the order of Titan, which is positively another Bayreuth! You may be interested to know that St Bernard is our leading Titanic tenor. You’ve no doubt heard of his Lohengrin, and as for The Ring…”

“Actually, Clea,” I broke in determinedly, “we’re not such great Wagner fanciers here, you know. Our Master inclines more to the French and Russian end of the spect…”

“As I was saying, St Bernard said we had to stop by, so he could meet you and Pluto—Pluto is somewhere about too, no?—because, you see, St Bernard happens to be your brother.”

“But—Motherlove… isn’t that rather…? I mean, if he’s my brother, then isn’t this a matter of—if you’ll excuse the expression—inbreeding?”

St Bernard’s hand reached for the battleaxe hanging at his side, but Clea stopped him.

“Nonsense, White Fang! He bears no relation to me whatever. Shame on you, for making such a suggestion! You know your father sired several hundred children. St Bernard was his son by Sieglinde of Titan years before I ever met Tennyson White. I suppose, if you want to pick nits, you could say that St Bernard is your half-brother. But he’s no more related to me than his father was—or, rather, that is his relation precisely.”

I made a slight bow in acknowledgment of this unexpected bond, but St Bernard, not content with small gestures, came gallumphing forward to clasp me in a half-brotherly, titanic embrace, which I sidestepped by sitting down quickly at the console. “A feast!” I declared. “This definitely calls for feasting and song.”

I vanished the arch and dialed for an Anglo-Saxon Banquet Hall, moderately stylized, with an Automatic Tumbler. Julie quickly whisked herself into a few yards of brocade and a high-peaked hat, and I got into something suitable in cloth-of-gold. Pluto was called for and arrived in short order in a cardinal’s gowns. St Bernard, a true and reverent knight, had to get back down on one knee to kiss the cardinal’s ring.

“Mead!” I shouted to the robots in attendance (all done up, appropriately, in fustian). “Roast boar! Venison! Hecatomb of roast beef!”

“Hecatombs is anachronistic, Cuddles,” Julie advised.

“Well then, if you’re such a hot-shot Medievalist, you order!” Which she did—and in Old High German at that. As she told me later, though, our Master helped with irregular verbs. When she finished, Petite added her own postscriptive request in English for butter brickle ice cream.

While we sipped before-dinner meads, the Automatic Tumbler tumbled and a Robo-Jester came around to the table and made deliciously bad jokes, which St Bernard seemed to think as jolly as they had been on opening night a thousand years ago. Maybe it was the mead. Alcohol-wise the stuff was perfectly innocuous, but our Masters supplied through our Leashes the exact degree of inebriation that each of us was aiming at. Clea filled us in on her missing thirteen years (and they were just about what one would suppose they’d been, judging by their effect on her: the style of Titan—Clea’s style—was very Wagnerian, very passionate, and very, very big); then Pluto gave an account of our neglect and redemption, which I don’t think Clea heard because St Bernard was tickling her all the while. After the fish course, some partridges, and a suckling pig with truffles, Clea and St Bernard sang the second act of Tristan und Isolde for our benefit. Julie, to escape listening to it, went blotto on her Leash.

This done, and much mead later, St Bernard proposed to give an exhibition of his skill at axe-throwing. They have this whole Middle Ages bit on Titan. We upended the oaken dining table and painted a human figure on it as a target. St Bernard insisted that we make wagers against him. I did have my doubts as to how well he would do, since he was having difficulties just remaining upright at that point—but every axe sank into the wood right where he told it to. Petite was clamorous with admiration.

“Hoi-ho, Maedchen! Does the sport please you?” St Bernard lifted Petite to his shoulder. “Would you like to join it?” She nodded, smiling, eyes aglow.

“Now, see here, St Bernard—enough’s enough! If you’re getting delusions of singing William Tell, I can assure you it isn’t in my daughter’s repertoire.”

“Oh, let him have his way, or he’ll get into a pet,” Clea advised.

“It’s exactly because I’m afraid he shall get into a pet—with that axe of his—that I worry. If you have so much confidence in him, Motherlove, why don’t you let him use you as a target?”

“I have, many times. It’s terribly dull. I mean, you just stand there. I wish you hadn’t gotten him so loaded. He always gets this way when he’s had more than he can handle. Next he’ll be sentimental. I hate that!”

St Bernard, meanwhile, had posed Petite before the dining table and gone back twenty paces to take aim. The blade of the axe he was using was fully a third of the total length of my daughter.

“Stop, madman!” I screamed, but too late—already the axe was hurtling at Petite, seeming to wobble as it turned end over end about its center of gravity. I rushed forward, as though to catch it in flight…

There now, good fellow, be comforted! Your Master is watching and he won’t let anything ill betide. Calmly, calmly.

If I had not had so much mead myself, I would not have needed the Leash’s reminder. For what could there ever be to worry about at Swan Lake with my Master ever watching over me?

When St Bernard had finished his demonstration to Petite’s and his own immense satisfaction, I stepped up to the board and pulled out the axes. “Now,” I said airily, “let me show you how we throw axes at Swan Lake. Julie, step up here!”

Julie, who had been sailing through heaven at the end of her Leash until this moment, came to with a start of real fear. “Cuddles, are you out of your mind? I will not!” But quickly her features assumed a milder expression, and I knew that our Master had whispered his reassurances to her. She took her place before the target.

I opened my demonstration with an axe that sliced neatly between Julie’s legs, rending the thick brocade of her gown. Then I threw one underhand that snapped off the peak of her cap. Then several perfect throws as I stood with my back turned to Julie. St Bernard gasped at the daring of the feat. I concluded my show of skill by spinning an axe not end over end but sideways, rotating about the shaft like a top.

I bowed to St Bernard’s thunderous applause. “Thank you,” I said, as much for my Master’s assistance as for St Bernard’s applause.

“But you are wonderful! You are a genius! Now I am proud that you are my brother. Come, we must make it a solemn union—we must swear eternal brotherhood in blood. Blutbruderschaft!” With these words St Bernard removed the leathern bracelet binding his right wrist and sliced across the exposed flesh with a jeweled dagger. “Now you,” he said, handing me the bloody instrument. “We will mix our blood, and then to the end of time…”

St Bernard was interrupted by my rather copious heavings (it had been a large feast), which I regret to say was the only thing I contributed to be mixed with his blood. I remember only his first oaths (“Wotan! Fricka!” etc.), for as soon as my stomach was emptied out I fainted dead away.

When I woke, I found myself moving through outer space. Pluto had been kind enough to explain to St Bernard my peculiar infirmity (though failing to mention his own part in that story), and St Bernard had insisted, as a sort of reparation, that we all accompany himself and Clea on their trip to Earth. Pluto and Julie had demurred, for they were even less inclined to the Wagnerian than I, but our Master, surprisingly, had overridden them. So we had set forth, the eight of us (six pets, two Masters) immediately, and in no time at all we were on Earth. The morning sun was glittering with immoderate intensity on the waters of Lake Superior, and there again in the middle distance was the cathedral tower of St John the Divine.

Can it be that I shall never again enjoy the easy pleasures of that time? That I shall never, never again see Swan Lake and fly about among the familiar asteroids? And can it be that this exile has been my free choice! O ye Heavens, when I remember you—as I do now—too clearly, too dearly, all the force of my will melts away and I long only to be returned to you. Nothing, nothing on Earth can rival, and very little has the power even to suggest, the illimitable resources of the Master’s pleasure domes. Oh, nothing!

It was paradise—and it is quite, quite gone.