Chapter Four
In which I am perfectly happy.
It was paradise. What more can I say?
Oh, I know that’s cheating. I know I have to try. But consider the immensity of the task; consider how many better men than I have tried and failed. Milton’s heaven is a bore; his Eden, though nice enough at first glance, has a deadly sameness about it. Dante did rather better, but even so most of his admirers find it more difficult to soar through his Empyrean than to climb the steep side of Purgatory or slough through Hell’s mires. On the whole, Heaven is best left in the hands of the gods.
Let me begin, then, with something easy, like geography…
Swan Lake was composed of twelve smallish asteroids, which our Master had artfully woven into a sort of celestial clockwork. The interwoven trajectories of the twelve asteroids had been determined with such niceness that the whole configuration—from twelve o’clock to twelve o’clock, as it were—came full circle once every hundred years. It was thereby possible with just a glance at the sky to determine the year, the month, the day of the week, and—within a few minutes—the hour, providing of course that one could remember the code. The largest of these asteroids, Tchaikovsky, was a scant ten miles in diameter, and the least, Milhaud, was a tawdry rock not five thousand feet from pole to pole. The main kennels and all permanent installations of any size were on Tchaikovsky, but any pet could travel freely to the other asteroids along broad slipstreams, or—if he was feelings his oats—just by jumping, since the gravity was a piddling •03 that of Earth anywhere outside the kennel proper. The kennels themselves were all gravitized at a comfortable •85 just as they had been at Shroeder.
Swan Lake, though done up in better taste than other kennels I have known, was built along the usual lines. The walls, the floors, all the elements of construction were force-fields wrapped in microscopically thin layers of stuff—atoms, molecules, that sort of thing. The only permanent feature in any room was a console that any pet knew how to operate. This console controlled temperature, humidity, wind velocity, illumination, fog effects, gravity and dimensions. The dimensional control was extremely complex, and only a professional architect of long experience (or a Master) knew all its ins and outs. Most of us contented ourselves with a selection from the thousand or so presettings: Louis Sixième, Barnyard, Dracula’s Castle, Whale-belly, Sahara, Seraglio Steamroom, etc. There was a special dial that controlled the degree of realism or stylization of any of these scenes, and one could produce some very uncanny effects by, for instance, demanding a totally abstract Bronx Renaissance living room or an ultra-realistic Pleistocene swamp. And the effects one could get by spinning the dial…!
No more! I can’t stand remembering these things. The happiness—
Stoicism, White Fang old boy, stoicism!
Actually, Julie and I spent most of our time out-of-doors, dashing in and out among the asteroids. The ten asteroids intermediate in size between Tchaikovsky and Milhaud were, in descending order: Stravinsky, Adam, Pugno, Prokofiev, Delibes, Chopin, Glazunov, Offenbach, Glière and Nabokov.
As my readers may have gathered from this list, the Master of Swan Lake was something of a balletomane. For each of his asteroids was named after a composer of notable music for the ballet—or, a slight but telling distinction, of music for notable ballets. In fact, all of Swan Lake had been fashioned, all the pets had been gathered there, to serve this single passion of our Master, which was, I hasten to add, our passion too, our entire purpose, and our highest happiness next to the Leash itself.
Oh, hell, I should never have started to try to explain! I might have known I’d end up like this, muttering dithyrambs.
I was explaining a little ways back, how Julie and I would go sailing out among the asteroids. Now such times as we did this, we were dancing. In fact all the time we were at Swan Lake, all those ten years, we never stopped dancing. And as we would soar past any one of the asteroids, our passage would trigger a recording—a miniaturized electronic orchestra, actually—that would play the single composition of that composer which most suited our velocity, trajectory, idiorhythmic motion, and mood. It could also improvise transitions from and to any piece of music in the repertoire of any of the other asteroids. These transitions were often the most amazing passages of all (imagine a collaboration between Offenbach and Stravinsky!), which encouraged us never to linger overlong in one vicinity but to be ever flitting about like will-o’-the-wisps.
There were other machines that served the same purpose as a crew of stagehands, managing the lights, providing props, laying scenes when the music demanded something more specific than fireworks…
And machines that released scents that were harmonized with the other elements synaesthetically…
Yes, and finally there was us—Julie and me and the other pets. The ensemble. It was on our account that Swan Lake had been put together, so that our revels never would be ended, so that we would have music wherever we’d go. I say we danced, but that will not convey to most of my readers just what we did. For the average Dingo, dancing is just an exercise preliminary to mating. It provides a release of certain powerful tensions along socially approved channels. When we danced, it was nothing so crude as that. Everything we did, everything a person could do, became part of our dance: our dinners, our lovemaking, our most secret thoughts, and our silliest jokes. The dance integrated all these disparate elements into an aesthetic whole; it ordered the randomness of life into immense tapestries. Not Art for Art’s Sake, but Life for Art’s Sake was our motto.
How am I to explain this to Dingoes? There was nothing wasted. I think that’s the important thing. Not a word or thought or glance between two persons but that there was a deeper meaning to it. It fit, just as in a piece of music that observes the canons each chord has its place in the melodic succession.
Here again was the old Romantic idea of a synthesis of the arts: the same that inspired Wagner’s Bayreuth or Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But the Master of Swan Lake had resources to accomplish what those men fumbled for—and his chief resource necessarily was his dearly beloved pets—us. He pampered us, he coddled us, he got us into trim. Not only physical trim (even the most negligent Master would see to that); more even than mental trim. In fact, too much acuity could be a disadvantage. Daddy’s Masters on Ceres and Ganymede had developed their pets’ intellects more than our Master altogether approved. There had always been something over-refined about that first generation of pets. Pope somewhere says of Shakespeare that he was an “unpolished diamond”. Well, what might not Shakespeare have said of Pope? The important thing, as we saw it, was not to be witty and cultivated and bright, but to be sincere. We of the second generation found our parents’ style dry, over-intellectual, unbecomingly ironic. We wanted to simplify, and since the material of our art was our own lives, we simplified ourselves. Like Young Werther, we cultivated a certain willful naïveté. Not only did we make a dance of our lives, but we turned the simplest statements—a “thank you” or a “by your leave”—into a sort of rhapsody.
It was certainly paradise, but what would not have been paradise with Darling, Julie there? It is nice to have a Master, but it is necessary to have a mate—as Woof observes somewhere in A Dog’s Life.