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.”