Short Fiction

Conditionally Human

There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands. His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house. He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack and miserable.

“Honeymoon’s over, huh?”

She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.

“You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,” he said. “You knew I’d have charge of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.”

“I didn’t know you killed them,” she said venomously.

“I won’t have to kill many. Besides, they’re only animals.”

“Intelligent animals!”

“Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe.”

“A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?”

“You’re taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity,” he protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless against sentimentality. “Baby—”

“Don’t call me baby! Call them baby!”

Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment, he spoke again. “Anne honey, look! Think of the good things about the job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house rent-free; I’ve got my own district with no bosses around; I make my own hours; you’ll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It’s a fine job, honey!”

She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.

“And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment. They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration. If I don’t want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common labor. That’s the law.”

“I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?” she said sweetly.

Norris withered. His voice went desperate. “They assigned me to it because I liked babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an aptitude for dealing with people. Can’t you understand? Destroying unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business, people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I’m just a dogcatcher.”

Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.

He backed closer to the door.

“Well, I’ve got to get on the job.” He put on his hat and picked at a splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. “I—I’ll see you tonight.” He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious that she didn’t want to be kissed.

He grunted a nervous goodbye and stumbled down the hall and out of the house. The honeymoon was over, all right.

He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were 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 big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were someplace where he could be completely alone.

As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris pulled to a halt.

He smiled at it from the window and called, “What’s your name, kitten?”

The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a stuttering high-pitched wail, then: “Kiyi Rorry.”

“Whose child are you, Rorry?” he asked. “Where do you live?”

The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost. It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He repeated the questions.

“Mama kiyi,” said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.

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

The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, “Mama no run ray! Mama no run ray!”

Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called “neutroids.” When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief; but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.

His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises were class-C—defective heredity.

He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was something he had been expecting for several days.