Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“I’m done,” Carol says. “Retire me, I’m serious. Take me off the roster, Anders. No more searches.”

“Carol,” Anders says.

“No. I don’t want to argue with you about this.” She gestures toward me without looking. “This isn’t what I spent the last twenty years doing. I don’t like this future.”

“Come on. It’s a training problem,” he says. “You can teach her to work closer to you.”

“That defeats the point of the EI!” Carol tosses her radio onto the folding table. “But you know what, it is a training problem. She’s training me for EI SAR work, and I don’t want to do it.”

“Excuse me, please,” says a man. I look up at him. He stands just outside the tent and smells nicely of spicy food. He holds a camera and wears a press pass around his neck. He calls to my teammates. “Can I get a couple shots of the dog and handler?”

Anders looks at Carol. Carol sighs, steps over a cooler toward me, and unhooks my leash from the folding table’s leg. I wag at the journalist to make a good impression.

He looks at me curiously.

“It’s Enhanced, isn’t it?” he asks. “The dog?”

Carol casts a look over her shoulder to Anders. It’s Carol’s job to talk about me to the press because she is my handler, but she’s never seemed enthusiastic about the job. She’s particularly hesitant in this moment. I can feel her desire to cross the command tent and finish her conversation, but Anders is already busy with his tablet and radio. The tension between the two of them is unusual.

“Sera?” says Devin from outside the tent.

The man with the camera, who may have also sensed the tension, looks at Devin with relief. Carol does too. I am good at reading human expressions; it’s one of the things they teach at ESAC.

“She’s Enhanced Intelligence, yeah,” Devin says. “First EI SAR dog in the field in the US. First nonmilitary EI dog doing anything, actually.”

The photographer looks confused. “Sar?”

“Sorry. Search-and-Rescue. This is Sera’s seventh find already, and she’s only been on the team for half a year. Some dogs don’t make that record in a lifetime.”

The man taps something on his camera and points it at me. Carol kneels beside me in the pose we do for all our pictures, and I look at the camera and open my mouth so my tongue shows and I look like the dogs people have at home and they will relate to me.

“Search dogs don’t find people that often?” the man asks. There’s a series of ticks and flashes.

“Well, we train all the time, but we don’t deploy that often. Three, four times a year usually. These storms, though.” Devin shrugs. “It’s been insane. SAR teams in from all over the region. Law enforcement, military, everybody’s working the cleanup and rescue ops.”

The man nods in a big, knowing gesture. He’s ignoring Carol now. “What’s the dog’s name?”

“Sera. S-E-R-A, for Serendipity. And that’s Carol Ramos there, one of the team founders and the best dog handler in the Midwest.”

Carol rises from her photo-pose crouch and hooks my leash back to the table. She says, “Nice to meet you,” to the man, and turns. My gaze follows hers; Anders has left the command tent.

“Thanks,” the man calls as she walks away. Carol raises a hand but doesn’t answer.

Devin steps toward me and pats my side. I lean away from the physical contact, but give him a conciliatory wag. He talks with the photographer for a few more minutes, but I am not listening.

Instead I watch Carol find Anders next to his van and continue their discussion—their argument. I strain my hearing, but the stormy sound patterns intrude. Instead I hear wind picking up as the barometric pressure continues to drop, softening the hush-wash growling of the interstate; intruding human voices, high and yelping; the sounds of urban life—traffic, the percussion of comings and goings and doings, dogs and kids and shouts—held at a remove by the perimeter of the storm’s destruction. I hear no wildlife. Wild animals don’t emerge in weather like this.

The man leaves and Devin drops into Carol’s portable chair and puts his feet up on the cooler. He looks at me and smiles. I want to follow Carol, but I am hooked to the table, and even though I could drag the table with no trouble or just unhook myself (my teeth and tongue are very dexterous), I know that when someone hooks a leash to something, it’s because they want the dog to stay. I stay.

Carol shakes her head at Anders. She gestures in the air with one hand. Anders tries to put his hands on her shoulders, but she uses the gesturing hand to brush him away. She looks out, across the line of parked cars and the staging area and the tented command center, and she looks at me. Anders looks at me too.

I don’t know what to do while they are looking at me like that. I am usually good at reading human expressions, but I need context in order to do it with accuracy.

What context do I have? Why are they arguing? The search ended in a successful find, the victim alive and our team uninjured. I count this search an even greater success personally, because Carol acknowledged my remote alert within the fifteen-second optimal feedback window. It was an ideal handler response, and a great improvement on our previous find record. On our last deployment find, Carol didn’t acknowledge my alert for 3:57:12, nearly sixteen times the optimal feedback number.

Carol often waits until she’s in visual range to acknowledge my alert. This can take anywhere from twenty seconds to two minutes or more. Continuing to work Mack reinforced her habit of visually acknowledging her dogs’ alerts. In fact, working with Mack appeared to make Carol entirely refuse the superior methods that I learned at ESAC. But Mack is no longer a factor. This time Carol’s acknowledgment was appropriate.

I review my log in the DAT and confirm that all my own behaviors were within acceptable parameters. I find no anomalies.

The tenor of Carol’s voice carries, but the wind blurs her words. Her posture is stiff and forward, her gestures tight. She glances again across the sprawling staging area at me. Carol’s body language indicates that she’s angry. I think she’s angry at me.

Carol is often angry at me.

Carol frequently avoids eye contact with me. She doesn’t speak to me much other than issuing cues and commands, even though she often spoke to Mack. She doesn’t initiate physical contact. She doesn’t throw a Kong on a rope for me when we do search drills and she doesn’t tell me I am a genius or a screwball and she doesn’t laugh at me when I roll on an excellent smell in the grass, all of which she did for Mack.

She doesn’t say, “You’re a good dog, Sera.” Instead she says, “Good work.”

Carol doesn’t seem to like me.

To be successful in the field, a dog and handler team must communicate well. They must be well-trained, focused on their job, and physically fit. I haven’t found anything on Modanet that indicates that they must like each other.

My own feelings on this subject are, I suppose, irrelevant.

The wind’s roar outside the hotel windows wakes me from troubled sleep. I am in my crate. In the bed, the dark shapes of Carol and Devin breathe shallowly. When Devin came to the door earlier, Carol told him that she didn’t want to talk, but they did talk. They talked about the find today and about the storms. They talked about Mack and his bad and strange behaviors. They laughed and Devin got them both tissues from the bathroom. Then they stopped talking, and their biometrics changed, and now they sleep.

I need rest to recover from the hard work of my search, but today’s events haunt me. Carol said no more searches. She said retirement. If Carol retires will I retire with her? I am only three years old.