order, be so affectionate and good-hearted?
He is trapped in a body that serves his enhanced intelligence less well
than the monkeys’ bodies serve them. He has no hands, as they have, and
his vision is comparatively weak, as is that of any domesticated breed
of canine.
The monkeys have the communal comfort of the troop, but Orson endures in
a terrible solitude. Though more dogs as smart as Orson might have been
created, I’ve yet to encounter another. Sasha, Bobby, and I love him,
but we are too little comfort, because we can never truly share his
point of view, his experience. Because he is, at least for now, a
singularity Orson lives with a profound loneliness that I can perceive
but never fully comprehend, loneliness that is with him even when he is
among his friends.
Maybe his basic doggie nature explains why he doesn’t share the monkeys’
hatred and rage. I think dogs were put in this world to remind humanity
that love, loyalty, devotion, courage, patience, and good humor are the
qualities that, with honesty, are the essence of admirable character and
the very definition of a life well lived.
In good Orson I see the hopeful side of my mother’s work, the real
potential of science to bring light into an often dark world, to lift us
up, to stir the spirit and to remind us that the universe is a place of
wonder and infinite potential.
She did, in fact, hope to accomplish great things. She aligned herself
with a biological-weapons project solely because this was the only way
to obtain the high level of funding needed to realize her design for a
gene splicing retrovirus, which she believed could be used to cure many
illnesses and inherited disorder snot least of all, my XP.
You see, my mom didn’t destroy the world without good reason.
She did it trying to help me. Because of me, all of nature is now poised
on the brink. Maternal love became the wellspring of ultimate terror.
So … you want to talk about your conflicted feelings for your mother?
Orson and I are her sons. I am the fruit of her heart and womb.
Orson is the fruit of her mind, but she created him as surely as she
created me. We are brothers. Not just figuratively. We are bound not by
blood but by our mother’s passions, and in that sense we share one
heart.
If anything were to happen to Orson, a part of me would die the purer
part, the better part and die forever.
“Gotta find him, ” I repeated.
“Faith, bro, ” Bobby said.
He reached for the key in the ignition, but before he could switch on
the engine, a sound arose, louder than the soft million-tongue flutter
of leaves in the breeze, swelling by the second.
Bobby put one hand on the Smith & Wesson in his lap.
I didn’t draw my pistol because I knew what I was hearing. The beating
of wings. Many wings.
Like wind-torn shingles from Heaven’s roof, the voiceless flock came out
of the night, tumbling down in a clatter and whirl of wings more than
half a block away, then flying parallel to the pavement, following the
street, streaking in our direction. The hundred birds I’d seen earlier
were surely part of this apparition, but another hundred had joined
them, perhaps two hundred.
Bobby decided against the revolver and snatched the shotgun from between
the seats.
“Ice it down, ” I told him.
He gave me an odd look. Usually, he’s the one advising me to stay cool.
Seventeen years of friendship ensure that he takes me seriously, but he
chambered a round in the shotgun nevertheless.
Spread the width of the street, the flock swept over us, no more than
six feet above our heads. I had the sense that they were flying with
astonishing precision, arranged in formations so orderly as to be
uncanny. An aerial view of the entire swarm might reveal patterns
intriguing because of their unnatural degree of complex order but also
disturbing because they would seem simultaneously meaningful and
indecipherable .
Bobby ducked, but I gazed up into the dark churning cloud of wings and