Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (37 page)

 

There are two police cars pulled onto the sidewalk before North Park’s main entrance. Linna takes in the sight of them in three stages: first, she has seen police everywhere today, so they are no shock; second, they are
here
, at
her
park, threatening
her
dogs, and this is like being kicked in the stomach; and third, she thinks:
I have to get past them.

North Park has two entrances, but one isn’t used much. Linna walks around to the little narrow dirt path from Second Street.

The park is never quiet. There’s busy Sixth Street just south, and the river and its noises to the north and east and west; trees and bushes hissing with the hot wind; the hum of insects.

But the dogs are quiet. She’s never seen them all in the daylight, but they’re gathered now, silent and loll-tongued in the bright daylight. There are forty or more. Everyone is dirty, now. Any long fur is matted; anything white is dust-colored. Most of them are thinner than they were when they arrived. The dogs face one of the tables, as orderly as the audience at a string quartet; but the tension in the air is so obvious that Linna stops short.

Gold stands on the table. There are a couple of dogs she doesn’t recognize in the dust nearby: flopped flat with their sides heaving, tongues long and flecked with white foam. One is hunched over; he drools onto the ground and retches helplessly. The other dog has a scratch along her flank. The blood is the brightest thing Linna can see in the sunlight, a red so strong it hurts her eyes.

The Cruz Park cordon was permeable, of course. These two managed to slip past the police cars. The vomiting one is dying.

She realizes suddenly that every dog’s muzzle is swiveled toward her. The air snaps with something that makes her back-brain bare its teeth and scream, her hackles rise. The monkey-self looks for escape, but the trees are not close enough to climb (and she is no climber), the road and river too far away. She is a spy in a gulag; the prisoners have little to lose by killing her.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” Gold says.

“I came to tell you—warn you.” Even through her monkey-self’s defiance, Linna weeps helplessly.

“We already know.” The pack’s leader, the German Shepherd dog, says. “They’re killing us all. We’re leaving the park.”

She shakes her head, fighting for breath. “They’ll kill you. There are police cars on Sixth—they’ll shoot you however you get out. They’re
waiting
.”

“Will it be better here?” Gold asks. “They’ll kill us anyway, with their poisoned meat. We
know
. You’re afraid, all of you—”

“I’m not—” Linna starts, but he breaks in.

“We smell it on everyone, even the people who take care of us or feed us. We have to get out of here.”

“They’ll
kill
you,” Linna says again.

“Some of us might make it.”

“Wait! Maybe there’s a way,” Linna says, and then: “I have stories.”

In the stifling air, Linna can hear the dogs pant, even over the street noises. “People have their own stories,” Gold says at last. “Why should we listen to yours?”

“We made you into what we wanted; we
owned
you. Now you are becoming what
you
want. You belong to yourselves. But we have stories, too, and we learned from them. Will you listen?”

The air shifts, but whether it is the first movement of the still air or the shifting of the dogs, she can’t tell.

“Tell your story,” says the German Shepherd.

Linna struggles to remember half-read textbooks from a sophomore course on folklore, framing her thoughts as she speaks them. “We used to tell a lot of stories about Coyote. The animals were here before humans were, and Coyote was one of them. He did a lot of stuff, got in a lot of trouble. Fooled everyone.”

“I know about coyotes,” a dog says. “There were some by where I used to live. They eat puppies sometimes.”

“I bet they do,” Linna says. “Coyotes eat everything. But this wasn’t
a
coyote, it’s
Coyote
. The one and only.”

The dogs murmur. She hears them work it out:
coyote
is the same as
this is the same dog.

“So. Coyote disguised himself as a female so that he could hang out with a bunch of females, just so he could mate with them. He pretended to be dead, and then when the crows came down to eat him, he snatched them up and ate every one! When a greedy man was keeping all the animals for himself, Coyote pretended to be a very rich person and then freed them all, so that everyone could eat. He—” She pauses to think, looks down at the dogs all around her. The monkey-fear is gone: she is the storyteller, the maker of thoughts. They will not kill her, she knows. “Coyote did all these things, and a lot more things. I bet you’ll think of some, too.

“I have an idea of how to save you,” she says. “Some of you might die, but some chance is better than no chance.”

“Why would we trust you?” says the Lab-cross who has never liked her, but the other dogs are with her. She feels it, and answers.

“Because this trick, maybe it’s even good enough for Coyote. Will you let me show you?”

 

We people are so proud of our intelligence, but that makes it easier to trick us. We see the white-truck men and we believe they’re whatever we’re expecting to see. Linna goes to U-Haul and rents a pickup truck for the afternoon. She digs out a white shirt she used to wear when she ushered at the concert hall. She knows
clipboard with printout
means
official responsibilities
, so she throws one on the dashboard of the truck.

She backs the pickup to the little entrance on Second Street. The dogs slip through the gap in the fence and scramble into the pickup’s bed. She lifts the ones that are too small to jump so high. And then they arrange themselves carefully, flat on their sides. There’s a certain amount of snapping and snarling as later dogs step on the ears and ribcages of the earlier dogs, but eventually everyone is settled, everyone able to breathe a little, every eye tight shut.

She pulls onto Sixth Street with a truck heaped with dogs. When the police stop her, she tells them a little story. Animal Control has too many calls these days: cattle loose on the highways, horses leaping fences that are too high and breaking their legs; and the dogs, the scores and scores of dogs at Cruz Park. Animal Control is renting trucks now, whatever they can find. The dogs of North Park were slated for poisoning this morning.

“I didn’t hear about this in briefing,” one of the policemen says. He pokes at the heap of dogs with a black club; they shift like dead meat. They reek; an inexperienced observer might not recognize the stench as mingled dog-breath and shit.

Linna smiles, baring her teeth. “I’m on my way back to the shelter,” she says. “They have an incinerator.” She waves an open cell phone at him, and hopes he does not ask to talk to whoever’s on the line, because there is no one.

But people believe stories, and then they make them real: the officer pokes at the dogs one more time and then wrinkles his nose and waves her on.

 

Clinton Lake is a vast place, trees and bushes and impenetrable brambles ringing a big lake, open country in every direction. When Linna unlatches the pickup’s bed, the dogs drop stiffly to the ground, and stretch. Three died of overheating, stifled beneath the weight of so many others. Gold is one of them, but Linna does not cry. She knew she couldn’t save them all, but she has saved some of them. That has to be enough. And the stories will continue: stories do not easily die.

The dogs can go wherever they wish from here, and they will. They and all the other dogs who have tricked or slipped or stumbled to safety will spread across the Midwest, the world. Some will find homes with men and women who treat them not as slaves but as friends, freeing themselves, as well. Linna herself returns home with little shivering Sophie and sad Hope.

Some will die, killed by men and cougars and cars and even other dogs. Others will raise litters. The fathers of some of those litters will be coyotes. Eventually the Changed dogs will find their place in the changed world.

(When we first fashioned animals to suit our needs, we treated them as if they were stories and we the authors, and we clung desperately to an imagined copyright that would permit us to change them, sell them, even delete them. But some stories cannot be controlled. A wise author or dog owner listens, and learns, and says at last, “I never knew that.”)

I
n addition to giving Nebula Awards each year, SFWA also presents the Damon Knight Grand Master Award to a living author for a lifetime of achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy. In accordance with SFWA’s bylaws, the president shall have the power, at his or her discretion, to call for the presentation of a Grand Master Award. Nominations for the Grand Master Award shall be solicited from the officers, with the advice of participating past presidents, who shall vote with the officers to determine the recipient.

Previous Grand Masters are Robert A. Heinlein (1975), Jack Williamson (1976), Clifford D. Simak (1977), L. Sprague de Camp (1979), Fritz Leiber (1981), Andre Norton (1984), Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1986), Isaac Asimov (1987), Alfred Bester (1988), Ray Bradbury (1989), Lester del Rey (1991), Frederik Pohl (1993), Damon Knight (1995), A. E. van Vogt (1996), Jack Vance (1997), Poul Anderson (1998), Hal Clement (Harry Stubbs) (1999), Brian W. Aldiss (2000), Philip José Farmer (2001), Ursula K. Le Guin (2003), Robert Silverberg (2004), Anne McCaffrey (2005), Harlan Ellison (2006), and James Gunn (2007). (The year indicates when the honor was presented.)