Jaak thought it had coyote in it because they were supposed to have been big adapters, and whatever our dog was, it must have been a big adapter to hang out in the tailings pits. It didn’t have the boosters we had, and it had still lived in the rock acids. Even Lisa was impressed by that.
I was carpet bombing Antarctic Recessionists, swooping low, driving the suckers further and further along the ice floe. If I got lucky, I’d drive the whole village out onto a vestigial shelf and sink them all before they knew what was happening. I dove again, strafing and then spinning away from their return slag.
It was fun, but mostly just a way to kill time between real bombing runs. The new IR was supposed to be as good as the arcades, full immersion and feedback, and portable to boot. People got so lost they had to take intravenous feedings or they withered away while they were inside.
I was about to sink a whole load of refugees when Jaak shouted. “Get out here! You’ve got to see this!”
I stripped off my goggles and ran for the monitoring room, adrenaline amping up. When I got there, Jaak was just standing in the center of the room with the dog, grinning.
Lisa came tearing in a second later. “What? What is it?” Her eyes scanned the theater maps, ready for bloodshed.
Jaak grinned. “Look at this.” He turned to the dog and held out his hand. “Shake.”
The dog sat back on its haunches and gravely offered him its paw. Jaak grinned and shook the paw, then tossed it a food pellet. He turned to us and bowed.
Lisa frowned. “Do it again.”
Jaak shrugged and went through the performance a second time.
“It thinks?” she asked.
Jaak shrugged. “Got me. You can get it to do things. The libraries are full of stuff on them. They’re trainable. Not like a centaur or anything, but you can make them do little tricks, and if they’re certain breeds, they can learn special stuff, too.”
“Like what?”
“Some of them were trained to attack. Or to find explosives.”
Lisa looked impressed. “Like nukes and stuff?”
Jaak shrugged. “I guess.”
“Can I try?” I asked.
Jaak nodded. “Go for it.”
I went over to the dog and stuck out my hand. “Shake.”
It stuck out its paw. My hackles went up. It was like sending signals to aliens. I mean, you expect a bio-job or a robot to do what you want it to. Centaur, go get blown up. Find the op-force. Call reinforcements. The HEV was like that, too. It would do anything. But it was designed.
“Feed it,” Jaak said, handing me a food pellet. “You have to feed it when it does it right.”
I held out the food pellet. The dog’s long pink tongue swabbed my palm.
I held out my hand again. “Shake.” I said. It held out its paw. We shook hands. Its amber eyes stared up at me, solemn.
“That’s some weird shit,” Lisa said. I shivered, nodding and backed away. The dog watched me go.
That night in my bunk, I lay awake, reading. I’d turned out the lights and only the book’s surface glowed, illuminating the bunkroom in a soft green aura. Some of Lisa’s art buys glimmered dimly from the walls: a bronze hanging of a phoenix breaking into flight, stylized flames glowing around it; a Japanese woodblock print of Mount Fuji and another of a village weighed down under thick snows; a photo of the three of us in Siberia after the Peninsula campaign, grinning and alive amongst the slag.
Lisa came into the room. Her razors glinted in my book’s dim light, flashes of green sparks that outlined her limbs as she moved.
“What are you reading?” She stripped and squeezed into bed with me.
I held up the book and read out loud:
I closed the book and its glow died. In the darkness, Lisa rustled under the covers.
My eyes adjusted. She was staring at me. “‘Dead Man,’ right?”
“Because of the dog,” I said.
“Dark reading.” She touched my shoulder, her hand warm, the blades embedded, biting lightly into my skin.
“We used to be like that dog,” I said.
“Pathetic.”
“Scary.”
We were quiet for a little while. Finally I asked, “Do you ever wonder what would happen to us if we didn’t have our science? If we didn’t have our big brains and our weeviltech and our cellstims and—”
“And everything that makes our life good?” She laughed. “No.” She rubbed my stomach. “I like all those little worms that live in your belly.” She started to tickle me.
I fought her off, laughing. “That’s no Yearly.”
“Third Grade. Basic bio-logic. Mrs. Alvarez. She was really big on weeviltech.”
She tried to tickle me again but I fought her off. “Yeah, well Yearly only wrote about immortality. He wouldn’t take it.”
Lisa gave up on the tickling and flopped down beside me again. “Blah, blah, blah. He wouldn’t take any gene modifications. No c-cell inhibitors. He was dying of cancer and he wouldn’t take the drugs that would have saved him. Our last mortal poet. Cry me a river. So what?”
“You ever think about why he wouldn’t?”
“Yeah. He wanted to be famous. Suicide’s good for attention.”
“Seriously, though. He thought being human meant having animals. The whole web of life thing. I’ve been reading about him. It’s weird shit. He didn’t want to live without them.”
“Mrs. Alvarez hated him. She had some rhymes about him, too. Anyway, what were we supposed to do? Work out weeviltech and DNA patches for every stupid species? Do you know what that would have cost?” She nuzzled close to me. “If you want animals around you, go to a zoo. Or get some building blocks and make something, if it makes you happy. Something with hands, for god’s sake, not like that dog.” She stared at the underside of the bunk above. “I’d cook that dog in a second.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. That dog’s different from a bio-job. It looks at us, and there’s something there, and it’s not us. I mean, take any bio-job out there, and it’s basically us, poured into another shape, but not that dog.…” I trailed off, thinking.
Lisa laughed. “It shook hands with you, Chen. You don’t worry about a centaur when it salutes.” She climbed on top of me. “Forget the dog. Concentrate on something that matters.” Her smile and her razor blades glinted in the dimness.
I woke up to something licking my face. At first I thought it was Lisa, but she’d climbed into her own bunk. I opened my eyes and found the dog.
It was a funny thing to have this animal licking me, like it wanted to talk, or say hello or something. It licked me again, and I thought that it had come a long way from when it had tried to take off Jaak’s arm. It put its paws up on my bed, and then in a single heavy movement, it was up on the bunk with me, its bulk curled against me.
It slept there all night. It was weird having something other than Lisa lying next to me, but it was warm and there was something friendly about it. I couldn’t help smiling as I drifted back to sleep.
We flew to Hawaii for a swimming vacation and we brought the dog with us. It was good to get out of the northern cold and into the gentle Pacific. Good to stand on the beach, and look out to a limitless horizon. Good to walk along the beach holding hands while black waves crashed on the sand.