An Oath of Dogs by Wendy Wagner

Author:Wendy Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85766-668-0
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-05-08T04:30:00+00:00

What does a dog know? Can it know its creator? Can it know it is a creature spun out of love and logos, or does it only know sensation, instinct, immediacy? Do dogs think?

It is impossible to take that last question seriously. One has only to watch animals for the briefest moment to see that they feel and have intentions just as we do. The difference is only that they do not name things.

– from The Collected Wisdom of MW Williams

Chapter Fourteen

Huginn, Day 179

Alex Perkins destroyed the cryo tanks this morning.

I’d been waiting for something bad to happen ever since I saw Vonda’s baby, but when I walked in and saw the mess in the root cellar, I fell on my knees and cried.

I had gone into the kitchen early to start a tray of bread. Bread’s a nice word for what I make out of ground pinto beans and sawdust, but it’s something to dunk in the flavored water I’ll call soup, and it’s nice to get up before anyone else and start the ovens. It’s really something, being warm and dry. You don’t appreciate it until you’re outside in the rain all the time. I turned on the ovens and I headed to the food stores to get another bag of beans. It’s cold down there, colder than my mama’s root cellar, and the blue lights of the cryo tanks are all the light we’ve got.

But this morning, the root cellar was dark, and the stink of death lay over the room, like the slaughterhouse before it gets washed out. I had to go find a lantern to see just what happened, but of course I already knew. Hadn’t Perkins told us all that he blames cryo for what’s happening to us?

Every last cryo tank had been smashed open. The embryos made a pinkish-gray pulp on the dirt floor, and cryo liquid pooled around the legs of the shelves. I began to shake with anger.

All those lives, put out like a candle.

What a waste. An unimaginable, horrible waste. Even if we couldn’t have raised those creatures to adulthood, we could have incubated them into something edible. To waste those lives when every morsel of food is a treasure and a terror all at once? Waste them, when I’m so hungry that my hair comes out of my head in handfuls?

I warned Matthias, but he refused to see that people were unhappy. Matthias might have been able to convince everyone to come here, but he can no longer make them want to stay. The anger inside me burns brighter and brighter, and I’m not sure who I’m angrier with: Matthias or Alex Perkins.

At least Matthias isn’t gloating over his mistakes. Perkins boasted about what he had done. Bragged right to our faces.

Matthias and some others are taking Alex to the spaceport tomorrow – to leave him there for good, shunned from the community. I don’t know yet if Mei Lin will go with him. Matthias is taking the last of our money to buy supplies.

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