“The thing is, Carol, you know how folks are. They talk. And you ain’t a kid no more. I don’t want nobody to think—”
“The only one that matters is Daddy, and he knows better. Besides, if you go on having lady-friend company, the ladies will tell them I sleep in the spare room and that you treat me like a daughter for my daddy’s sake.”
Again Denny nods. He likes the idea of having lady-friend company and a clean house, too. “But I can’t, uh, pay you nothing, Carol, things are tight right now. Maybe later when—”
“I don’t want any money, Denny. All I want is for you to teach me how to use the Subnet. On your terminal, same as you taught Daddy. For two hours a day, at least in the beginning.”
He doesn’t like that. Too much time. But just then one of the cats squats and shits on the table, into a plate of rice so congealed the rice grains are hard as kitty-litter pellets.
“Okay,” Denny says.
All winter I work like hell. I throw out Denny’s couch and everything else I can’t boil. I scrub and pound and make a new couch out of boards and blankets. I cook and launder and shop with Denny’s dole credits. Twice a week I walk over to Daddy’s to do the same for him. And half the night I practice what Denny teaches me, until I’m tired enough to sleep. A lot of days my eyes ache from the constant reading, and not only on the Subnet, either. I spend hours in the science sections of the Net. When one of Denny’s girlfriends complains that I “talk snooty,” I realize that my vocabulary has changed. Well, why not… everything else has.
By the time crocuses push up through the snow, Denny can’t teach me any more. Actually, I know much more than Denny’s taught me, because I found other people on the Subnet who also taught me things. There’s an entire class of Subnet riders—mostly young, mostly with little to lose personally—who like nothing better than showing off what they know. I’ve learned how to let such people impress me.
However, that sort of petty rider only knows so much. So does Denny. And I have nothing to trade. So far I haven’t been able to get the Subnet to tell me the one thing I want to know the most. And I’m not going to find it out by staying here.
I write notes to Denny and Daddy, and I walk down the mountain to the highway.
The Red Goldfish Trucking Company is guarded by dogs.
There’s a fence, too, of course, a single strand of token wire to mark the Y-energy-alarmed barrier surrounding the facility. I push against the invisible field with one hand, and it feels solid as brick. But any power-generated security system has to be turned on, and that means it can be turned off. Dogs are harder to turn off, unless you kill them, and it’s hard to get anything like a bullet or a slab of poisoned meat through most Y-energy security fields without setting off the alarm. There’s a Subnet rumor that the Sleepless have developed a missile to penetrate Y-barriers, plus a field that will stop that same missile and anything else, including air. But it’s only a rumor. Sleepless do not sell weapons. They’re too smart to arm their enemies.
I stand a few inches outside the fence and gaze in at the Red Goldfish Trucking Company. It’s a windowless foamcast building standing in the middle of rows of white trucks, each with a red goldfish painted on both sides. Before the goldfish, those trucks bore flowing blue script that said Pennsylvania Shipping. Before that, they had the blue daisies of Flower Delivery Systems. Before that, the orange lettering of Stanley Express. It was a Stanley Express truck that delivered Leisha the pregnant dog to Daddy’s new business.
No record exists on-line of that transaction. It’s hard enough to track the company itself on the Subnet, let alone its customers. Or its owner.
I watch through the fence for two nights, very carefully, until I’m sure about the dogs. There are three dogs, all German shepherds, all unneutered males. They’re probably genemod for strength and hearing. They’re superbly trained, much better than poor Donna could have done. They sleep in shifts. They are not genemod for intelligence.
You can do certain things to the genetic makeup of dogs and they remain functioning dogs. Other things you can’t do. You can’t really boost a dog’s intelligence much. If you do, you end up with a pattern of neural connections too complex for the hindbrain to handle. It’s like a cable jammed with too much information. The signal breaks down. The pups just sit in one place and shiver and whimper. They can’t be fixed, and eventually you have to kill them. Some scientists at Harvard published a paper about this on the Net. Some underground labs in Ohio and Florida already knew it. They advertised HIGH IQ DOGS! on the Subnet. Until they didn’t anymore. Somebody’s looking for them, too, although I don’t think it’s an angry customer. I think it’s the cops.
The cops are the main link between the Net and the Subnet. But they’re not the only link.
Red Goldfish Trucking’s dogs patrol the entire fence every six minutes. They’re efficient, alert, and dedicated. But they’re still dogs.
Just before one of them passes my place outside the fence, I roll over on my back. I’m wearing perfume: a scent genetically created as a wolf attractant for use in Consolidated Wilderness Areas. It was developed at the University of California at La Jolla, which holds the patent. It was also developed at underground labs in Idaho and Minnesota. You can order it at Subnet 784jKevinMart, access route 43ICE7946, through JemalTown, Cash Drop Described Elsewhere.
The guard dog smells me. His gait falters. His gaze shoots sideways to me, on my back on the ground, all fours in the air, the posture of submission in wolf packs. And dog packs. But I’m outside the fence. After that brief falter, he resumes his normal pace and trots on.
Six minutes later, I’m still there.
At midnight the dogs change shifts; I don’t know on what conditioned signal. The new dog goes through the same reaction to me: faltering, then going on. I roll slightly, wiggling, my limbs in the air. At 3:00 A.M., I go home. Workers show up here every day at four.
I’m back the next night. And the next. During the day I work for a housecleaning company that sends out maids to rich houses. Very quickly I become popular with their customers. I’m skillful at using the special bots for each job, and I’m especially good at cleaning up disasters left by other, malfunctioning bots.
On the twentieth night, the 4-P.M.-to-midnight dog stops on his side of the fence, reaches through the Y-energy with one paw, and cuffs me roughly on the butt. He’s the alpha male, the biggest of the guard dogs, the one who carries his tail the highest and his ears pricked forward the farthest. He tears a gash in my padded trousers and then trots away on his regular patrol.
I lie still, waiting for him to return. Six minutes later he does, cuffs me again, and moves on.
By the end of the month, half his body juts through the Y-fence, which from the inside he doesn’t know is there, while he rolls me around on the ground. Sometimes he’s rough, sometimes just playful. I have deep scratches on my neck and hands. I try to keep him away from my face, and when I fail, I wear heavy makeup at work. When the dog’s on top of me, snapping and fake-growling, I try to never remember Precious.
It’s not the dog’s fault. His brain is hard-wired. All the dogs in a pack pick on one dog. That’s the function of the omega dog, the last and lowest: to give all the other dogs something to pick on and exploit. The pack needs that outlet to work off tension they might otherwise use fighting each other. The omega dog is in their genes.
Sometimes, when Alpha takes my arm in his jaws and shakes it, I put my hand on his neck. I can feel the beeper, just under his skin. It’s transmitting the electronic signal that lets him penetrate the fence if he happens to brush up against it without setting off alarms. And anything attached to him would also penetrate: you don’t want the alarms going off just because your guard dog’s tail brushed a Y-field and that tail just happens to have a burr stuck on it.