The Second Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Robert Silverberg

with a fox and producing her!

      When she was satisfied with the room’s condition she had come and sat beside him.

      “What should I do now, Master?” she had asked.

      He had reached up and done what he had not had the nerve to do up until then, and had stroked the fur on her arm. It was soft and sleek.

      She had taken this as a cue, and had responded by stroking him back, and then unbuttoning his shirt.

      He’d made a vague attempt at expressing his doubts and reservations about the propriety of this, since they were different species. He had said something about voiding the warranty, about physical compatibility, but she had swept that aside.

      “Oh, they knew it would happen,” she had said as she crouched over him, tail waving. “It was one of the things they designed us for, right from the start, and they trained us for it, too. They can’t advertise it, of course, but I think everybody knows.”

      Her fingers were amazing, and he was delighted by how little her tail got in the way. The fur added a whole new element.

      Even so, she made love like a woman, rather than a fox, which was just as well. Al did not care for any nipping, and was pleased to have her on top and facing him.

      Of course, those pointed little teeth and the shape of her mouth did limit things somewhat, and he would want to keep her claws filed down, but all in all, it was quite an experience.

      He remembered that on the flight home, and decided that she was definitely worth the extra airfare.

      * * * *

      She settled in quickly. His apartment achieved and maintained a degree of cleanliness he hadn’t believed possible; she answered the phone when he was out, and took messages flawlessly.

      He was rather surprised, as he had been so often by her, when he realized she could read and write.

      “It’s useful,” she said. “So they taught us.”

      The woman he had been dating, one Mandy Charpentier, dumped him because of Sally—she didn’t make a big scene, but she did call him a pervert.

      “Hey, I didn’t go out and buy her, I won her, on TV!” he protested.

      “And you kept her, didn’t you?” Mandy shot back. “Are you trying to tell me you couldn’t have traded her in, or sold her somewhere?”

      Al was basically a truthful person; he let Mandy go.

      He worried about it, briefly—was he a pervert? The new term that was being used by the inevitable campaigners against the immoral use of anthropomorphs was “furvert.” Was he a furvert?

      He eventually decided it really didn’t matter whether he was or not. He dated other women, took some of them to bed—and when they weren’t there, Sally was.

      His friends met Sally, marveled at her. A few were offended; a few were intrigued. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he never let anyone else touch her—except once, after a particularly wild date, when he brought the woman home and the three of them wound up in bed together. The human woman had seemed almost obsessed with Sally’s fur; Sally, for her part, had been fascinated by the woman’s smooth hairlessness.

      That particular woman wanted nothing to do with Al after that night.

      His food bills more or less doubled, which left him with less disposable income than he was used to, but he got by. He went to fewer shows, bought cheaper clothes.

      He taught Sally his favorite recipes; she already knew how to cook, but her repertoire was sadly limited at first.

      His electric bills went up; Sally preferred sleeping a few hours each day, and staying up most of the night reading or watching TV. He could have ordered her not to, but that seemed needlessly cruel, and the bills weren’t unmanageable.

      A small price to pay for having a household companion.

      For having, he admitted, a slave.

      There were ads on TV for anthropomorphs—more and more of them, it seemed. There were a few dozen varieties of cat-person, there were seal-people and dog-people and pig-people. There were vixen-ladies up to Mark Six now, and fox-men to Mark Four. Bear-men, lion-men, swan-women.

      Al marveled at how human the New Gene Corporation could make all those different species. He wondered why other companies didn’t seem to be able to, even though NGC didn’t claim to have any patents on their processes. Their nearest competition came from Polyform Biologicals, and PB’s Poly-Pets were small and stupid, limited to perhaps a hundred words of vocabulary and a few simple tasks.

      Sally seemed as bright as he was—maybe, he admitted to himself, brighter. He wondered if the genetic engineers might not have overdone it.

      “You know, Master,” Sally said one night, as he got ready to crawl into bed after a late date, “I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes I feel jealous of those women you go out with.”

      Al turned and looked at her.

      “I know, I know,” she said, “I’m just an animal, and you’re a human, but I do. I won’t do anything about it, of course, but I wanted to let you know—just so, you know, if I get angry or say anything nasty, you’ll understand why.”

      He hadn’t answered; he didn’t know how. Instead, he had canceled his dinner date for next Saturday, and stayed home with Sally.

      * * * *

      He had had her almost a year when it happened.

      He came home from work and let himself in; she was not waiting there to greet him. That wasn’t particularly unusual; sometimes she was asleep. He hung up his jacket and turned.

      She wasn’t asleep. She was sitting in the living room, staring at the TV.

      Her eyes were fixed on the screen with an intensity he had never seen before.

      “What is it?” he asked, crossing to her.

      “Shh!” she hissed, without turning.

      Puzzled, surprised that she had dared to shush him, he sat down beside her on the rather battered sofa and looked at the TV. A toothpaste commercial was just ending, to be replaced by a news desk.

      “Welcome to the second half of Channel 8’s Eyewitness News,” the anchorman said. “Recapping tonight’s top story, FBI agents have arrested most of the management of the New Gene Corporation on a variety of charges, including fraud, slave-trading, and murder. Four NGC executives are reported to have attempted suicide, two of them successfully, while others are still at large. Authorities say that genetic testing has demonstrated that the so-called anthropomorphic pets marketed by NGC are, in fact, human-derived, rather than animal-derived as the company claimed, and that under present law, all such anthropomorphs are human beings, free citizens, entitled to the full protection of the law…”

      It was Al’s turn to stare in shock at the TV, while Sally slowly turned to stare at him.

      When the news switched to something about central Africa, Al looked at Sally.

      “I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear I didn’t know!”

      “Neither did I,” she replied. She hesitated. “So if I’m human—do all humans feel like this? Confused and unsure all the time, and trying to hide it by working at little things, to distract themselves from the big ones?”

      “Probably,” Al said. “I do.”

      They stared at each other for a long moment.

      “I can’t keep you,” Al said. “I mean, I’d be glad if you stayed, but I can’t make you, I can’t tell you what to do. They said something about a settlement…”

      Sally nodded. “We’re all going to collect damages—they’re liquidating NGC and parceling it all out. If there’s enough, they might pay back some of what the owners paid.