Terry Pratchett - The Long Mars

‘And war,’ Mac said sourly. ‘Their wars span continents too.’

‘War, yeah. We understand something of the political landscape. The beagles are grouped into Packs, which roughly correspond to our nations – or maybe what we think of as our races. The North American Pack is ruled by a Mother, as they call her, who’s on the west coast, not far from San Francisco Bay. There are local, umm, fiefdoms, each ruled by a Daughter or Granddaughter of the Mother. It’s a matriarchy, as you can tell from the language. Males are warriors, workers – breeding partners. Subordinate. Though there’s no difference we can detect in levels of intelligence between the sexes.

‘And they do have devastating wars. They come in cycles, as far as we can tell from some preliminary archaeology, and their own accounts of their history. A war, and the resulting plagues and famine, causes a population crash, but when the numbers recover, war comes again. Mostly the infighting arises within individual Packs. The basic motivation is Granddaughters trying to displace Daughters, and Daughters trying to displace a Mother. Inter-Pack war seems less common. But in the worst cases you get flare-ups covering a continent – hell, maybe the whole planet for all we know. Afterwards they just build everything up all over again, using the same sites, building slap on top of the smoking ruins. This latest war, however, the first since humans were here on hand to witness it, seems to have been tougher than most.’

Maggie expected Mac to comment on that. Instead he just kept staring out of the window.

‘You must have seen something of this,’ she murmured. ‘Everybody on this boat seems to have secrets to keep from me. You too, Mac?’

Still he would not react. She turned away, obscurely hurt.

‘Thank you, Gerry,’ she said now. ‘OK, folks, we have a mission to fulfil here, as you’ll see. Let’s get down there and get it done.’

They landed close to the in-situ researchers’ huddle of tents.

The senior academic, an Australian called Ben Morton, known to Mac – he couldn’t hide that from Maggie – was waiting to meet them. A haunted-looking older man, Morton barely acknowledged Mac, before he offered to drive them in the researchers’ only vehicle into the beagle town, the Eye of the Hunter.

They bumped along an uneven track, past clumps of forest of low, gnarled trees, like ferns perhaps, and fields roughly delineated with straggling dry stone walls. What looked like grass was cropped by animals: not sheep or cattle or goats, but things like fat deer, and a kind of beefy flightless bird. Some of the fields were tended by workers who went upright, on two legs, swathed in rags and bearing walking staves. Maggie didn’t get too close a look. At first glance they looked human – and after all, humans came in a variety of body shapes. But look again at these workers and, elusively, subtly, they didn’t appear quite right, the head too large, the waist too low, the eyes set too wide apart.

Her companions took in all this, Hemingway in nervous silence, Mac with a kind of resentful glare. Maggie was growing sure that there was something specific he was keeping from her about his experience here.

Wu Yue-Sai was making notes on a small tablet.

Many of the farms had been looted, burned out, destroyed, Maggie saw from the beginning of the ride. And the evidence of war became more obvious as they approached the heart of the city, and certainly once they’d passed within its low, largely broken-down walls. She suspected the buildings here, of wood and daub, would always have looked irregular, even unfinished to a human eye, and they were oddly set out, clustered along straggling dirt streets – no grid pattern here. But now they were smashed, burned, only a few roughly repaired.

Given the size of the place she saw very few inhabitants, and fewer up close. But one child stood as they passed. Dressed in rags, she held out an empty bowl, her request obvious. It was a scene you might have seen in the aftermath of any human war, Maggie thought. But the child’s eyes glittered, her ears were swept back, and a pink tongue lolled from a wide mouth.

At last the truck rolled up beside a more extensive ruin, a fire-blackened crater surrounded by scraps of scorched wall. There was a dog, a big one, bigger than a Saint Bernard, lying in the shade of one fragment of wall. He raised his head to watch them approach. He wore some kind of belt around his waist, Maggie saw.

‘Welcome to the Palace of the Granddaughter,’ said Ben Morton.

And the dog spoke.

‘He-hhr name Pet-hhra. Long dead.’ The language was clearly comprehensible English, but spoken with a growl, like a coarse whisper from the back of the throat.

A canine sapient. Maggie had been briefed about this, had even seen recordings. Nothing prepared her for the reality, though. Not even the talking cat in her own sea cabin. That was obviously artificial, a smart technological toy. This, though . . .

Her culture shock got worse when the dog stood up. He got up on his hind paws, almost like a trained animal in a balancing act. But then the movement became more fluid, his anatomy seemed to adjust somehow, and he was standing, a biped as fully developed as Maggie was, his waist low but his lower legs supporting him easily. He wore a kind of short kilt, and that belt from which, she saw now, tools dangled. His face did not have the obvious projection of a dog muzzle; it was flat, proportioned something like a human’s, but the nose was broad, black nostrils flaring. His ears were sharp and lay back against his scalp, and his eyes were wide apart, unblinking, fixed on her. A predator’s gaze. Maggie had a sense of age, from the slightly awkward stance, from grey hairs around a wide mouth. Age, and injury; one forearm looked almost withered, and he held it against his chest.

He wasn’t a dog. He was humanoid, as she was, but moulded from canine clay, as she was from the ape.

She’d asked for this encounter. But not for the first time she wondered whether, in the end, she was going to have the intellectual strength, the imaginative capacity, to face the true strangeness of her long mission, if she felt so overwhelmed by this first encounter with the alien.

‘You’re a beagle,’ she said.

‘So we h-have been called, by you. My name to you – B-hrr-ian.’ He pulled his lips back, revealing very canine teeth, in what might have been an approximation of a grin. ‘I ss-it to meet you like ghh-ood dog. Yes? Now I call.’ He tipped his head back and howled, a suddenly very wolf-like sound; Maggie heard the call echo from the remains of the buildings.

Morton raised an eyebrow at the visitors. ‘Brian’s one of our main contacts here. One of the more, umm, humanized of the local beagles. He has a distinctive sense of humour. Mordant, you might say.’

‘Mo-hrr-dant? Not know that wo-hhhrd. Look up later.’

‘We’ve given him English language dictionaries, grade school stuff, and other teaching aids. We’re learning a great deal from him.’

‘And I too lea-hhrn,’ Brian said to the bemused visitors, like the other half of some bizarre trained-animal double act, Maggie thought. ‘My job always-ss to learn, when Pet-hhra was alive. G-hranddaughter. Killed in wa-hrr. For he-hrr, my learning useful. Learn of kobolds, learn of humans. Yet she despised me,’ he said, and he hung his heavy head and shook it. ‘Poo-hhr B-hrrian.’

Mac snorted in disgust. ‘Christ. It’s like he’s begging for a treat.’

‘Ignore him,’ Morton said. ‘Just showing off. He’s useful but he can be a real asshole. Can’t you, Brian?’

Brian laughed, an oddly human sound. ‘Ass-sshole? You come sniff me then, Ben-nn. You know you wan-tt to. Asshole? T-hhrue. All beagles assholes. You see how we kill each other-hrr in war. Over and ove-hrr.’