And so humans continued to breed in the old manner. Some animals did, after a caring discussion with their humans, either get them fixed or medicate them for pregnancy control; but Tim could not yet bring himself to do that to Mimi. Not that some of the behaviors she had begun to exhibit did not trouble him. They had warned him at the shelter that traditionally asexual species like his own tended to be particularly challenged when humans entered the late adolescent phase of their life cycles, but in his heart he had been imagining the delight of a little human infant cuddling on Mimi’s lap just as she was wont to cuddle on Tim’s. He had quite been unprepared for the shock he felt the first time that, hearing some rustlings and gigglings in the yard one afternoon, he looked out the window to find the neighbor’s Yoyo on top of Mimi in the grass, rutting ruthlessly between her legs. A wave of horror and nausea churned through him. His body went quite fluid, so that if he had not clutched a chair for support, his bulges would have poured limply out over the blue and white tiles of the kitchen floor.
At first, in a rage, he had forbidden Mimi to see Yoyo again, but then, discovering them together again the next week in the tree house, with her on top this time, shoving and rocking, he went to speak to Yoyo’s owners. A cross-species family of spiders and scorpions, they were pleasant and sympathetic, but not prepared to intervene. They believed in letting humans act out their natural instincts, they told Tim rather preachily, and anyway Yoyo had been vasectomized, so what was the problem?
Tim told this story to Edwina, a fennec fox and a fellow shelf stocker at Wal-Mart whom he had always considered a friend.
“I don’t know what you expect, Tim,” she said bluntly, arranging the folds of a unispecies rain poncho over a chimera mannequin. “We may talk about humans as if they’re animals like the rest of us, but if we’re honest we have to admit that they’re a completely different organism. We bring them into our homes and treat them as if they’re domesticated, but they’re an uncivilized species and always will be.”
Tim looked at Edwina in surprise. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” he said. “Lots of animals can’t stand them, I know, but didn’t you used to have a little baby human?”
“Yes,” said Edwina, “and when he was old enough I released him into the wild, where he belonged. I don’t hate them, Tim, I respect them. They’re a part of the natural world. They listen to their instincts, while we dictate to ours. When it was time for them to stop evolving, they obeyed the decision of their own bodies. Sure, when they mate, they’re slaves to themselves. But with us, with our megademocracy and our unanimous votes, each animal is a slave to every other animal. We might own humans, but they’re their own masters, you know?”
“Not really,” said Tim. “Mimi is so cute when she gets down on her knees to beg for food, but she’s not much of a master. And I bring her everything she wants and I don’t ask her for anything. I know she gives me affection, but if she stopped liking me, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it. So I don’t think she’s much of a slave either.”
Thoughtfully, Edwina poured a small puddle of bright green water around the galoshes-clad feet of the mannequin. “I’m just saying,” she observed, “that the humans are actually alive. Animals are so perfect that we barely even exist these days. I mean, look at the sleepers. Up and down the aisles, reaching out for products they don’t even see, much less want, just to keep from getting woken up. And everybody treats them like saints. I’d like to see them all mating like maniacs in the produce cooler, I really would.”
Tim winced. His favorite sleeper was passing at that moment, a bacterial hive-mind he’d privately christened Sunny for the cloud of eerie yellow shimmering phosphorescence that pulsated around her ever-shifting form in its delicate glass tube as she rolled hesitantly, unsteadily through the store on her wheeled wire rack. Even though all the species were entirely equal, the animals knew the bacteria were something special, something spiritual and otherworldly and slightly terrifying but also wonderfully wise. Tim decidedly did not want to see Sunny flat on her back in a bed of produce, giggling and spilling her multiple selves from the top of her tube, but he thought he might like to take her home and care for her somewhat in the way he cared for Mimi, swaddling her fragile glass in deep pillows and silken sheets, tending her pH levels like an acolyte, breathing in the dangerous, musky, humid vapors that whispered out around the imperfect seal of her cork.
He told Edwina he had to go change the filters on the aquatic carts for Wal-Mart’s marine customers, and followed Sunny through cleaning supplies and past pollens and nectars into the lurid pink and red canyon of the labmeat aisle. She faltered by a long spiraling roll of beef shawarma, drawn perhaps by the heat, and Tim thought for a terrifying moment that she would come to a halt and be woken and ejected for nonmovement. He had seen sleepers woken before; they came flailing up into consciousness bewildered and amnesiac and always freezing cold. But then Sunny dipped forward to nudge a tin of salt pork into her cart and trembled onward. Tim drew up alongside her and slipped the salt pork between his bulges, wishing he could fit her inside his viscous body and smuggle her out through the sighing suction tubes of the front entrance.
“I saw that,” said Edwina, right behind him. Tim twitched: a little spasm of guilty surprise. “Don’t worry,” said Edwina. “I couldn’t care less. In fact, I support your little desecration of the sleepers cult. That labmeat is disgusting, though. When will I ever get you to go vegetarian with me, Timmy?”
“It’s exactly the same as real meat,” said Tim, worriedly watching Sunny rattle away into the hazardous sharp zone of tools and home improvement.
“Labmeat hasn’t died, Tim,” protested Edwina. “Death is our life force! If the meat we eat has never perished, we cannot be said to be truly living on it. At least plants have actually kicked the bucket. Some of them are even still alive while we’re chewing on them.”
Edwina had loved striking radically reactionary poses for as long as Tim had known her, and it had always been funny and made for good conversation, but it seemed to Tim that it was getting harder and harder to tell whether or not she was still kidding around.
“Do you really want us to go back to killing each other for food?” he asked her.
“Us?” mocked Edwina. “I don’t recall the great heyday of the predator slime molds, Tim.”
“Our hunting was silent and microscopic,” he said, smiling, “but we ate heartily.”
Edwina cackled with delight and rubbed her nose with affection against Tim’s nearest touch receptor, tickling him till he sneezed, messily.
When Tim got home from work, the neighbors were having a cookout, all the kids swinging back and forth from the trees on long sticky swings while the female adult sipped beer in a newly spun hammock chair and her male presided over the grill, stabbing the steaks occasionally with a venomous marinade. Tim thought they looked happy and he knew he felt a little jealous. Family units had been almost entirely abandoned when clonic reproduction went mainstream, but now they were on the upswing again, with animals of various species forming domestic alliances and adopting offspring from municipal nurseries like the one where Tim himself had grown up.
There had been nothing wrong with his childhood, but he retained so few distinct memories of the nursery that he had to believe that little that was either good or bad had happened to him then. Now he couldn’t help staring at the spiders and scorpions—and, he noticed, one little wasp who looked to be a new addition—as they yelled happily at one another across the backyard. Was this the kind of partnership he wanted to have with Sunny? He felt envious both of the intimacy of his neighbors’ affection and of the variety of their little family, although why a small collective of diverse species should seem more cozy and comforting than an enormous nursery of thousands of slime-mold clones, he didn’t know. Surely the latter option offered a greater number of confidants and a more reassuring sense of identity.