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"I've got a name for you," Andromeda whispered in the dark. "Jackajack. Do you like it?" The little puppy was in bed with Andromeda. He liked it. He liked everything. "If you weren't an animal," she whispered, "I would call you John and you would be my boy." The little puppy gazed up at her, his eyes lit by an unbounded willingness.
Why do people love children? Why do children love babies? Why do we all love animals? What do animals love, that way? Everything, the whole world, more, even the stars up there-stars like the star called Andromeda, fixed in the scattered heavens, burning bright.
You couldn't really blame the villagers. They were all having a very bad time, and they weren't equipped for bad times. Whereas, in days gone by, the people would go about their tasks with tears of contentment in their eyes, now they wept the other tears. And where were they to turn? Down the soft decades they had lost the old get-up and go-the know-how, the make-do. Predation and all its paraphernalia had quite petered out of their gene cams and pulse codes. Given a generation or two, and given their new knack or curse of sudden and active adaptation, oh, I suppose they might have come up with something, in time. But there wasn't time.
They looked for authority, and what did they find? The natural leaders were, of course, the women with the loudest voices and the strongest personalities; and if you think Keithette is redoubtable enough, you should check out Clivo
And so they asked death in through the back door, and let him feast on the malevolved, the beakmen and wing-women, the furred or shelled or slippery beings with their expressions of stu
On the way home they were followed for a while by a group of women who shrieked and chanted at the little puppy, and made unpleasant faces, cowing him rather badly. "Come on, Jackajack," said Andromeda loudly. "Never mind them." So he jinked along beside her, glancing back uneasily over his dropped shoulders. But Andromeda did not glance back. She walked straight and true, filling her given space. For Andromeda enjoyed an ambiguous prestige in the village; she certainly had rarity value. It was partly to do with such things as her refusal to go and live in the child pool, and the fact that she had changed her own name. She had changed it from Briana-to Andromeda, if you please. But it was really all about beauty: beauty. Nobody knew what people were supposed to look like anymore or could guess at the human forms they once had graced. The women all rugged and ruddy and right; the men all drab, effaced, a
"Look, Jackajack," she said. They had come to the edge of the crater, the core, the deep dish and its great query of fire. Now the flames ate the air, spitting and chewing and clearing their throats. No one fed the fire yet it burned anyway, with no fuel-but with fission, perhaps; perhaps fission's daughters lay trapped beneath the crust. Although the village was godless, the crater was agreed to be at least semisacred, and the people felt its codes, sensed its secrets with reluctant awe. Certainly no one went down there just for the hell of it. And now of course it served a different function. "Look, Jackajack," whispered Andromeda. Down in the contoured chasm, ringed by fire, some women were tethering an old Queer to the stake, ready for Shatterday. The little puppy barked. He didn't like fire. Nor did the dog. But the dog didn't mind fire that much. He could put up with it, if he had to.
Keithette sat heftily at the round table, micromonitored by Tom and Andromeda. Both had been present at the informal, morning-long seminar that Keithette had convened. The subject: Keithette's sensibility. The really warm work of the afternoon, though, had fallen on Tom alone-a tight regime of scalp kneading, hair braiding, intertoe loofahing, and hourly sexual intercourse. It hadn't worked. Nothing worked now. Because tonight was a night of the dog. And now it seemed that every day was Shatterday.
True to Andromeda's prediction, the inevitable came to pass and soon the supply of Queers was pretty much exhausted. Actually they were picked off a lot quicker than anybody bargained for, because even the dog turned his nose up at some of them. He killed them all right, with one swipe of his bleeding claws, and gave the corpses a frightful worrying; but he wouldn't eat them. He just stood there, stupid and implacable, for hour after hour (he stayed upright at all times, even during his egregious naps), before tearing off the dead Queer's best limb and trudging away with it-to return the next night, and the next. Now he would peer down into the lit crater and see no offering for him there. Just the crackling fire, no louder or brighter than the fire of hunger in his heart.
"Here he comes," said Keithette.
Yes, here he comes. You could hear him liquidly snorting and yodeling as he loped toward them over the fields, nearer, ever nearer. The whole village listened-listened in darkness to a world of sound. His creaking gait, his grunts, his great gurglings at the prospect of messy satiation. Next, his long silence at the brink of the crater, his thwarted howl of disappointment, his final scream of ravenous rage. Then the sniffings and rootlings round the huts, the latherings and flappy droolings, the regular flinging of his bulk against any weakness, the splitting of wood, the human cries, the heavy arhythmical bounding of the chase, the incensed rip-pings and gulpings of the kill… Once, as the dog was fizzily consuming his prey, the little puppy (held fast on Andromeda's lap) gave out a piercing yelp. Outside there was sudden silence-followed, several minutes later, by a growl of fabulous greed and hatred, inches from the front door. But the dog's hunger had lost its rawness (and there'd be another night), and all they heard then were the usual sounds of grumbling haulage as the dog dragged the half-eaten carcass out of the village and into the hills.
"He's going now," said Keithette. She closed her eyes and wiggled a finger at Tom, who moved grimly toward her. "When will the dog stop coming? When? When? Why don't I know what to do? Why? Why? Tomorrow I'll speak to Royene, and to Clivo