Dogs

Books By Nancy Kress

Prince of Morning Bells
(1981),
The Golden Grove
(1984),
The White Pipes
(1985),
Trinity and Other Stories
(1985),
An Alien Light
(1988),
The Price of Oranges
(1989),
Brainrose
(1990),
Beggars in Spain
(1993),
The Aliens of Earth
(1993),
Beggars and Choosers
(1994),
Oaths and Miracles
(1996),
Beggars Ride
(1996),
Maximum Light
(1998),
Stinger
(1998),
Beaker's Dozen
(1998),
Yanked
(1999),
Probability Moon
(2000),
Probability Sun
(2001),
Probability Space
(2002),
Crossfire
(2003),
Nothing Human
(2003),
Crucible
(2004),
Nano Comes to Clifford Falls
(2008),
Steal Across the Sky
(2009),
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall
(2012),
Flash Point
(2012)

Non-Fiction

Beginnings, Middles & Ends
(1993),
Dynamic Characters: Hosw to Create Personalities That Keep Readers Captivated
(1998),
Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint
(2005)

"Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear."

A book gets written in many different ways. Some begin as an image, some as a character, some as an idea. Some are suggested by a third party, or a news item, or a continuing interest of the author's. Some pop into the writer's mind with sudden and great urgency:
Write this!
Others start as no more than a vague, nagging feeling:
I ought to be writing something.
Slowly that feeling becomes a hazy situation, which equally slowly coalesces into an opening scene.

Usually, however, it's some combination of these that impels words onto paper or screen. That was true of
Dogs.
But “impel” is not the right word, because this book had been a mind-haze for a long time.

At a World Science Fiction Convention, I had lunch with my agent, the late and much-missed Ralph Vicinanza, to discuss my next project. I had written two thrillers, and Ralph suggested I do another one, “but this time with a female protagonist. Someone like you: older, intelligent, lively, cosmopolitan.” Well! Who could resist that kind of flattery (even if not all of it is true)? Immediately my mind started churning, and in a few days I could see Tessa. She is, of course, nothing like me. She is an FBI agent, which means she is athletic, analytical, tough-minded, and used to guns. I am a couch potato, emotional, and regard guns much as I do large snakes.

But writers always use parts of themselves in their characters, because that's what is most readily available. Tessa, like me, was a recent widow. She re-located after her husband's death. She needed to build a new life. She spent some time in an Arab country. And she has a toy poodle.

Ebola jumps primate species easily. Think what could have happened if Ebola in its most deadly form had escaped that monkey house into the population of Virginia.

Fascinated by the possibility, I mulled over the incident for the next several years. I thought I might write about an animal-carried plague, but I didn't want the bubonic-plague model, in which fleas on rats carry the disease but aren't much affected themselves. Then avian flu broke out in Asia. This was closer to what I wanted; chickens could become infected and infect humans, although only if humans had close, prolonged contact with the chickens. More interesting to me was the response of various Asian governments: Quarantine and destroy the birds. Billions of chickens were sacrificed, most uninfected. But still the book didn't feel ready to write. In fact, it wasn't actually a book yet, just a vague haze of topics:
Plague. Animals. Government response.
No strong push to think further than that.

The push came from 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

The attack on the World Trade Towers, which so sharply clarified the bitterness of Arab jihadists for the United States, profoundly discouraged me. When young, I'd lived for a year in an Arab country (Tunisia) and had developed a liking for Arab culture, as well as a respect for the complicated, tangled ways that I couldn't write about it from an Arab point of view. I was too much an outsider.

After Hurricane Katrina, people felt a lot of anger regarding how FEMA handled the crisis. I read the posthurricane interviews with furious people who had been badly let down by a flat-footed government more interested in its own prestige than in protecting its citizens.

Then, in 2003 I relocated and acquired Cosette.

The well of unconsciousness is a strange thing, and a hot zone in its own right. Disparate elements simmer down there, braising and combining and changing. I had written before about genetic engineering and the frightening ability of pathogens to mutate. Now ideas mutated in that deep well, and I had the plot of
Dogs.
Why do canines carry my plague? Partly because dogs can harbor viruses that make them profoundly dangerous to human beings—not because diseases easily jump species barriers (they don't) but because retroviruses like rabies can cross the blood-brain barrier and change canine behavior. More important, thirty-five million American households keep sixty-five million dogs, and they love them passionately. Spot and Fido and Cosette are not regarded in anything close to the same way as medical-research monkeys or Asian chickens.

So I wrote the book. But that was only the beginning—it still had to be published. For more on that, see the afterword, which relates the book you are about to read to certain truths about American publishing.

» 2

Tessa Sanderson was awakened by the phone. She glanced at the clock: 6:30 A.M. Well, the alarm would have gone off in half an hour anyway. Sleepily she groped for the receiver. Probably it was Ellen, her sister often called too early, Ellen's infant son got her up at some God-awful hour…but maybe Tessa had better check the Caller I.D. anyway. There were so many people she did not want to talk to.

Caller I.D. said the call was from the Hoover Building.

Immediately Tessa snatched her hand off the receiver. No way. No more condolence calls, no more rehashes about why she quit, no more arguments with Maddox, her former boss.
No more.

Now she was irreversibly awake. Minette, the world's most spoiled toy poodle, was curled tight against Tessa's thigh and growled as Tessa pushed aside the blankets. Minette was supposed to stay on her own dog pillow at the foot end of the bed, but she never did. When Salah had been alive…

None of that. No self-pity.

Tessa padded into the kitchen of her new house and put on the water for coffee. It was important, she had decided, to stick to a routine as much as possible. A routine filled the days, accomplished worthwhile goals, kept her from firing her Smith & Wesson into her left temple. A routine, as Ellen pointed out every morning, was vital to a regulated life. Ellen was big on regulation. Tessa was big on getting through the day in one piece.

The phone rang again. The FBI once more, but this time Bernini's direct line. Ellen stared at Caller I.D. The Assistant Director himself, at 6:30 in the morning? Didn't seem likely. Bernini had already made his condolence call, lacking either the courage or the foolhardiness, or maybe just the grace, to show up at Salah's memorial service. Of all the FBI personnel Tessa had worked with until her resignation, only two field agents and the secretaries had attended the funeral.

Tessa let the phone ring until the answering machine picked up. “This is 240-555-6289,” her own voice said. “Please leave a message.”

“Tessa, this is John Maddox. I very much need to talk to you. It's not about any of the things you think it's about. Please pick up.” Pause. “Tessa, pick up.” Longer pause. “I'm going to keep trying, so please call me this morning. It may be urgent.”

And if that wasn't a typical Maddox message, Tessa would eat her new living room rug, which lay still rolled on her new hardwood floors. As she prepared her coffee, Tessa dissected the message, getting angrier with each mental point.

Point one:
“It's not about any of the things you think it's about.
”
How the hell did Maddox know what she thought his message was about? Did he think that she assumed the message was about her resignation from the Bureau three weeks ago, after she'd been passed over yet again for promotion despite a sterling record in counter-terrorism?

Damn right she assumed that.

Or did Maddox think she assumed her non-promotion was due to her late husband's ethnicity? Salah Mohammed Mahjoub, citizen of Tunisia until she'd met and married him in Paris.

Damn right she assumed that, too.

Point two:
“Tessa, I'm going to keep trying.
”
He'd have his secretary keep trying, long-suffering Mrs. Jellison, the Rosemary Woods of her generation. Maddox would sit in his office and go on with his work until Mrs. Jellison said, “Mr. Maddox, I've got Agent Sanderson on the line.” By then he might even have forgotten that he'd wanted Tessa.

And for what? Point three: That
“It may be urgent.
”
What a weasel word, “may.”
Anything
may be urgent under the right circumstances. A lemon drop may be urgent if it's stuck in your trachea. Tessa was no lon
ger interested in Maddox's lemon drops.

She sipped the last of her coffee, put the cup in the sink, and opened a living room window. Cold February air rushed in, bracing and sweet. Tessa liked winter if it wasn't too cold, and Maryland had been having a mild run of sunny days in the 40s. The window looked out on a small backyard, the first Tessa had ever owned, edged with what the realtor had promised would be lilacs. Now, however, they were just more bare bushes, looking curiously naked and vulnerable. There were also what the realtor promised would be lilies of the valley, but Tessa planned on digging those up. They could poison a small dog. Tessa, who'd never before lived outside a city, had carefully researched all floral threats to Minette.

Beyond her yard and the little town of Tyler rose the Appalachian foothills, dull green with pine, crowned with snow. Somewhere up there Maryland turned into West Virginia.

In T-shirt and panties, Tessa sat down on her meditation mat on the hardwood floor, assumed the lotus position, and faced the brass statue that was the first thing she'd unpacked.

The phone rang again.

Breathe in, breathe out…

“This is 240-555-6289. Please leave a message.”

Breathe in, breathe out…

“Tessa, John Maddox again. Listen, I need you to pick up. Now. We just received a second classified report. There's a lot of intelligence chatter, and it's very specific.”

Breathe…

“It includes your name, and your late husband's.”

Slowly Tessa turned her head toward the phone.

“If you don't pick up, I'm sending two agents out there to bring you in immediately.”

Tessa got up off her meditation mat and picked up the phone.