The Leash was simply their touch. Those floods of ecstasy it brought were nothing more than the Masters’ way of tugging on our collar. A touch of their hand could transmute a human nervous system from gross lead to gleaming gold, or scramble a brain into idiocy with, literally, the speed of lightning, but it could not, without changing the nature of the beast, make a man something he was not. They could not, in short, raise us up to their own level.
Desirable as the Leash was, one could not coerce it. Like the state of grace, it came as a gift or not at all. How often a pet was Leashed and the intensity of the bond depended upon the whim or good will of one’s master. And here I must clear up another popular misconception: all Masters are not alike. They have discrete and individual personalities, as any pet who has had more than a single Master can tell you. Some of them seemed to be deeply concerned for their pets’ well-being. (How large this interest loomed in the whole framework of any Master’s life can never be known, for all that a pet can know about his Master is what sort of interest he takes in pets.) Others simply put them into a kennel and let them languish there, scarcely ever bothering to Leash them and put them through their paces. Such a master was the Master of the Shroeder Kennel.
Pluto and I were placed in the Shroeder Kennel within a week of our father’s assassination. Clea told us that it would be only for a little while and then she would be back for us. Perhaps she meant it, but I have always felt that her deed was very much on a par with that of Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother. Clea surely knew the sort of place the Shroeder Kennel was, for we had heard her complain about it to our poor father. Daddy, we were sure, would never have left us in such a joyless place. But Clea, now that Daddy was out of the picture, now that the glamor was gone, simply didn’t give a damn for the two puppies he had given her.
In a purely physical sense, we were well cared for, I’ll grant that. The Shroeder Kennel (named for a little town that had once occupied that site, of which it had been said, in the days before the Mastery, that you could throw a frozen turd from one end of town to the other without much experience as a pitcher) had an excellent gymnasium, warm and cold pools, indoor tennis and golf courses, good robotic instruction in all sports, and the kennel rations were prepared with that exquisite simplicity that only the most refined tastes can command. Our rooms, both public and private, were spacious, airy, and bright. The central architectural feature of the Kennel, the jewel for which all else was but the setting, was a reconstruction, perfect in every detail, of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City. (Why? I have always wondered. Why that? Why not Notre Dame, Salisbury, the Frauenkirche?) The reconstituted cathedral was set amid acres of English landscape gardening and playing fields. Naturalness was everywhere the style of the thing, and it was no less natural for being adjusted, indoors and outdoors alike, to our convenience. Thus, in the summer the air was filtered and cooled, and in the winter the dome that encompassed the kennel heated us and added extra hours of sunlight and warmth to the brief northern days. The dome delimiting the kennel was fully a mile in diameter, and within its bounds our comforts were secure against the enmity of the Dingoes.
It would have been an ideal existence—if only our Master had truly cared for us.
Motherlove left us at the gate of the Shroeder Kennel at sunset of an autumn afternoon. Outside the dome, the ground was sere and the tree branches already denuded; within, the grass was a perpetual midsummer green, and though the leaves of the trees still crimsoned and fell, they did so in graceful sequence so that there was never a preponderance of decay. Motherlove blew us a parting kiss; then, wreathed in baroque spires of golden light, like an irradiated Bernini Madonna, she ascended into the clear blue sky of October. As her figure diminished to a pinpoint and vanished, we felt our Leashes fall away (for no Master’s influence can extend beyond a dozen or so miles) and our minds stood naked in an alien world—a world that, having just been the scene of our father’s bloody death, we could not suppose to be friendly.
In the middle distance we could make out the spire of the cathedral, and, supposing it to be the administrative center, we made our way toward it along a neatly graveled path that circled a field where a gymnastic competition was in progress. Five youths were running pell-mell along a dirt track in a race so evenly contested that none of them could hold the lead more than a few meters at a time. A distance away other young men hurled the discus and javelin, while dispersed over the grass at regular intervals, like polka dots, pairs of wrestlers strained against each other, groaning with effort. Each of these gymnasts was blond, deeply-tanned, and constructed according to the specification that Michelangelo had developed for his “David”. Neither Pluto nor I were of a mind to disarrange so splendid a grouping of figures in a landscape by asking our way from them, any more than we would have thought to disturb a display of china figurines on the mantel of a house we were visiting for the first time. We pressed on cheerlessly to St John’s.
The Master of Ganymede from whom Pluto and I had received our earliest education had not been an enthusiastic archaeologist, so there had been few reconstructions on Ganymede other than of a purely utilitarian sort—a scaled-down version of Hampton Court, a couple of Palladian villas, that sort of thing. Nothing monumental. Our first impression of St John the Divine was out of proportion, therefore, to anything but its proportions. It is a vulgar building, but it is an incredibly big building. With my chin hanging slack and my heart pumping at double-time, I stretched out my hand to touch the torus at the base of one of the gigantic columns at the rear of the nave. It was cool and tingly, reminding me that what here seemed to be stone was in fact much less substantiaclass="underline" an immensely strong force-field with a skin of matter only one molecule thick. It was this stagey method of construction (let me assure you, though, that the illusion was perfect, the stagecraft consummate) that made “Architecture” a matter of such indifference to the Masters. Under such conditions munificence was taken for granted, and taste became the sole consideration.
Though it was empty, there was something about the cathedral that made Pluto and me wish to stay there. The sheer magnitude of the place seemed to put our little problems into perspective. What could we possibly matter beneath a ceiling as high as all that? It is the size of the gods, and nothing else, that endears them to their worshippers. The best god is simply the biggest.
(Forgive me, dear reader, these little wanderings from the true path of narrative. Theology is my special vice, but I must learn to keep a tighter rein on it.)
Shortly after we had entered the cathedral, a solitary worshipper came in behind us: a young lady of indeterminate age (I would have guessed eighteen, and I would have been wrong), wearing clothes of a most improbable cut, and a complexion so white that a geisha might have envied her. She blessed herself at the front, then walked down the center aisle with such a deal of swaying and unsteadiness that one feared, despite the voluminous base provided by her hoop skirt, that she would topple at every step. Her black hair was done up in an artful and complicated style and was surmounted by a bonnet of even greater complications—a construction of cloth, flowers, jewels, and papier-mâché that seemed to vie with the high altar for the attention of the faithful. It seemed a shame that there was no one but Pluto and myself present to admire it. When this mirror of fashion had reached the foremost pew of the nave, she genuflected (I thought she had really toppled then), entered, and knelt in an attitude of devotion, reading from a little black book she had taken from her reticule.