Dark Benediction

“Ah, yes. Norris spoke of you, my dear. This is Doctor Georges. I have a very urgent problem to discuss with your husband. But perhaps I can talk to you.”

“You can probably get him on the highway. There’s a phone in the truck.” What sort of urgent problems could doctors discuss with dogcatchers, she wondered.

“Afraid not, my dear. The inspector doesn’t switch on his phone until office hours. I know him well, you see.”

“Can’t you wait?”

“It’s really an emergency, Mrs. Norris. I need an animal from the pound—a Chimp-K-48-3, preferably a five year old.”

“I know nothing about my husband’s business,” she said stiffly. “You’ll have to talk to him.”

“Now see here, Mrs. Norris, this is an emergency, and I have to have…”

“What would you do if I hadn’t answered the phone?” she interrupted.

“Why I—I would have—”

“Then do it,” she snapped, dropped the phone in its cradle, marched angrily away. The phone began ringing again. She paused to glance back at it with a twinge of guilt. Emergency, the fat voice had said. But what sort of emergency would involve a chimp K-48, and what would Georges do with the animal? Butchery, she suspected, was somehow implied. She let the phone ring. If Norris ever, ever, ever asked her to share his work in any way, she’d leave him, she told herself.

The truck whirred slowly along the suburban street that wound among nestled groups of pastel plasticoid cottages set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country had become one gigantic suburb, dotted with community centers and lined with narrow belts of industrial development. There was no open country now, nor had there been since the days of his grandparents. There was nowhere that one could feel alone.

He approached an intersection. A small animal sat on the curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. The crown of its oversized head was bald, but its body was covered with blue-gray fur. A pink tongue licked daintily at small forepaws equipped with prehensile thumbs. It eyed the truck morosely as Norris drew to a halt and smiled down out of the window at it.

“Hi, kitten,” he called. “What’s your name?”

The Cat-Q-5 stared at him indifferently for a moment, uttered a stuttering high-pitched wail, then cried: “Kitty Rorry.”

“Kitty Rorry. That’s a nice name. Where do you live, Rorry?”

The Cat-Q-5 ignored him.

“Whose child are you, Rorry? Can you tell me that?”

Rorry regarded him disgustedly. Norris glanced quickly around. There were no houses near the intersection, and he feared that the animal might be lost. It blinked at him, sleepily bored, then resumed its paw-bath. He repeated the questions.

“Mama kiyi, kiyi Mama,” it finally reported.

“That’s right, Mama’s kitty. But where’s Mama? Do you suppose she ran away?”

The Cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment. Its fur crept slowly erect. It glanced both ways along the street, shot suddenly away at a fast scamper along the sidewalk. Norris followed it in the truck for two blocks, where it darted onto a porch and began wailing through the screen: “Mama no run ray! Mama no run ray!”

He chuckled and drove on. A couple who failed the genetic requirements, who could have no children of their own, could get quite attached to a Cat-Q-5, but the cats were emotionally safer than any of the quasi-human chimp-K models called “neutroids.” The death of a neutroid could strike a family as hard as the death of a child, while most couples could endure the loss of a cat-Q or a dog-F. A couple with a genetic “C” rating were permitted to own one neutroid, or two non-humanized models of daily food intake less than four hundred calories each. Most psychologists regarded the neutroids as emotional dynamite, and advised attaching affections to some tail-wagger with a lower love-demand potential.

Norris suddenly lost his vestigial smile. What about Anne? What outlet would she choose for her maternal needs?—for his own Social Security card was stamped “Genetic-C”—and Anne loved kids. He had been thinking in terms of the kennel animals, how she might direct her energies toward helping him take care of them, but now that her hostility was evident… well… suppose she wanted a pseudoparty and a neutroid of her own? Of this, he disapproved.

He shuddered slightly, fumbled in his pocket, and brought out a slightly battered invitation card that had come in yesterday’s mail:

You are cordially invited

to attend the pseudoparturition

and ensuing cocktail hour

to celebrate the arrival of

HONEY BLOSSOM

Blessed event to occur on

Twelveweek’s Sixday of 2063

at 19:30 hours

Reception Room, Rockabye Hours Clinic

R.s.v.p. Mr. & Mrs. John Hanley Slade