“It won’t be much longer now, Clea my loveliest. Besides, this is good for you. Being out here in the country, off your Leash and on your own, develops self-reliance and initiative.
“—self-reliance and initiative!” Clea said with a stamp of her gold-slippered foot. “I want my Leash. But it’s not me I’m worried about. It’s the boys. It’s been weeks since White Fang and Pluto have had any lessons. They’re running around these woods like a couple of wild Indians. Like Dingoes! What if they were captured! They’d be eaten alive.”
“Nonsense. You’d think this were Borneo or Cuba, the way you go on. There aren’t any Dingoes in the United States of America in the year 2024. This is a civilized country.”
“What about those people you said you met the other day—what was their name? The Nelsons. They were Dingoes.”
“They were just poor honest country folk trying to scratch a living out of the dirt. Once you get through to them, they’re very friendly.”
“I think it’s disgusting!” Clea said, stretching out in the little gravity-pocket of the Prefab that our Master had left behind so that we would not be utterly without the amenities. “Talking with them. Eating their dirty food. You could catch a disease.”
“Then I’d call up the Shroeder Kennel and be cured. Really, this part of Minnesota is just as civilized as anything on Ganymede. I like it here. If I had my way…”
“If you had your way, we’d all become Dingoes! The Shroeder Kennel—don’t talk to me about the Shroeder Kennel! Have you been there? Have you seen the way the pets are treated on Earth?”
“Not to the Shroeder Kennel exactly, but…”
“Well, I have, and I can tell you it’s barbaric. Those poor pets live like animals. It’s like something before the Mastery. They all run around unleashed, in this awful sunlight, out-of-doors, among all these loathsome vegetables…”
“It’s only grass, my love.”
“It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting to want to live here. Why you wanted to bring me and the children to this living hell, I’ll never comprehend.”
“I’ve explained to you a dozen times—my work requires it. I can’t even begin the sequel until I’ve recaptured the feeling of the place—the sense of being stranded here, of being without hope, of being mortal…”
Motherlove gave a little gasp of horror and covered her ears. The idea of mortality—even the word—was too depressing. She went to the medicine dispenser and dialed for a skyrocket, a mildly euphoric beverage derived from LSD. In a little while she was hallucinating happily in her own little pocket of gravity. Pluto and I wanted some drugs too, but Daddy promised us he’d read us a chapter from A Dog’s Life instead.
My father Tennyson White belonged to the first generation of humans to grow up away from the planet Earth. Born in 1980, just ten years after the first manifestations, Daddy had been abandoned on the steps of a power station. His first Master had been more interested in botanical specimens than in caring for foundlings, and so his early education had been erratic. Even so, it was such an education as no human had ever had before—with the possible exception of John Stuart Mill—and one feels that Mill did pay a rather steep price for his education. But with a Master assisting, one can be as polymathematical as one would like. Language and science, music and gymnastics—anything that requires more of competence and familiarity than of creative insight—can become “second nature” with no more effort than it would take to read a novel by, for instance, George Eliot.
At the age of three Daddy was sold or traded or somehow exchanged (just how the Masters arrange these matters among themselves none of their pets have ever been given to understand; when asked, the Masters make an analogy to the gold standard—but who has ever understood the gold standard?) and transported to the asteroid Ceres, where his abilities were cultivated to the full by one of the first truly great breeders. In fact, it was largely due to the successes of the Master of Ceres that the study and breeding of homo sapiens gradually usurped the attention of all Masters involved in Terran problems. Whether we are to be grateful to the Master of Ceres for this is not within my province to judge. I only wish to make it clear that, from the age of three to the age of twenty, Daddy could not have wanted a better Master or more thorough cultivation.
Then at the age of twenty it was discovered that Daddy had leukemia. Though it was easily within the competence of his Master to have cured him of this wasting disease (what was not within their competence, after all?), nothing was done. As his Master explained to Daddy, as he lay there in his sickbed, it was considered unsporting to tamper with basic genetic materials, as any permanent cure would have required. Daddy protested and was assured that his case was being debated in the highest councils of the Mastery, but that it would be an indeterminate time before any decision could be reached. Meanwhile Daddy was shipped back to Earth, much as a piece of inferior merchandise might be returned to the factory. There, in an inferior, overpopulated, and understaffed hospital in Northeastern Minnesota, haunted by the knowledge that his life or death was nothing but a sporting proposition to the Masters, he conceived of his great novel, A Dog’s Life. He began writing it the same day his Master announced to him that his leukemia was going to be cured and that he would be allowed to return to his home on Ceres.
A Dog’s Life was an epoch-making book—like Luther’s Bible, or Das Kapital, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even the Masters read and admired it. Tennyson White received the Nobel Prize, was elected to the French Academy, and was the first man to hold two seats in the American Congress—he was the senior senator from Arizona and the representative from the Ninth District in Minnesota. More than any other person, it was he who effected the reconciliation of men and their Masters. And it was just for that reason that the Dingoes—the small element of the population that still resisted the sovereignty of the Master—had marked him for vengeance. It was from A Dog’s Life, in fact, that they had taken their name.
The wonder of that novel is that it’s told entirely from a dog’s point of view—a real dog, a canine of the Industrial Revolution. The realistic surface is never distorted by the demands of the allegory, and yet… And yet, no one has ever surpassed Daddy in depicting their essential and unfathomable alienness. As Woof to Mr Manglesnatch, so man to his Master. The analogy is almost infinitely extensible.
Before A Dog’s Life, the Dingoes (this is still the most convenient name to use when discussing the various dissident elements prior to 2037, for though they went by any number of names—Republicans, Baptists, Harvard Club, B’nai B’rith, etc.—they never could come together on a good brand name to sell revolution) had used such words as “kennel”, “leash” and even “pet” as invectives. Daddy’s book rather turned the tables. It gave them the old one-two-transvaluation-of-all-values-sockeroo punch, as it were. Thus, it became a point of pride to be a pet; to be domesticated was self-evidently a superior state than to be wild. One has only to observe the difference between a greyhound and a wolf, a clever dachshund and a vulgar Dingo, to see why the Masters are innately our… Masters.
There were other, more trifling consequences of the book’s vogue. Everyone who read it, everyone who was anyone, began to name his children after famous dogs. There hasn’t been a generation of puppies with stranger names since the Pilgrim Fathers went off the deep end back in the seventeenth century. To mention only those who have gone on to win fame on their own: Ladadog, Bobby Greyfriars, Little Sheba, Rintintin, Beautiful Joe, Snoopy and See Spot Run.