He was still nearly blind and all but deaf when it first happened.
Four legs wobbling, snout snuffling, he felt the words more than heard them. A vast voice from above, a hand beckoning.
“C’mere!”
Obediently he toddled, though he did not know why.
“That’s it! Good boy!”
And oh.
Oh.
Oh. That was why he had done this.
“C’mon boy! Scoot!”
And he did, bolder and wobblier than ever, closer to the voice and the hand, straining, desperate, and-
“Good boy!”
It was like warm sunlight and his mother’s tongue against his fur all at once, pouring down from above and filling him from ears to tail. But it hadn’t even left him when he felt the need for more.
“Scoot, that’s it. That’s a good name.”
Scoot accepted this without much notice or thought. It didn’t involve the words.
***
“Go!” said the woman, and Scoot went. He went through the tube and weaved through the bars and onto the see-saw and over the beam and across the tightrope and through the eel tank and down the hall of whirling blades and he reached the end and he won, he’d beaten the times without a scratch, he was the fastest to have ever done the course but he didn’t care because-
“Good boy!”
His mouth smiled, his leg thumped, his tail wagged so furiously it nearly came off. Yes, that was it.
“Very good boy!”
Oh, that was it indeed.
“BEST boy!”
Scoot rolled over on his back and wriggled hopelessly in delirium. The crowd was roaring, the sun was shining, he’d never been so happy.
But the words weren’t being said, and so it was already draining away, through the edges of his senses, the brink of his brain, the rim of his body. The warmth still faded, as great as it was, as good as it could be, as boy as he’d been.
He needed more.
***
Scoot had watched hands and arms all his life. The gestures, the praise, the hold-on-nows, the go-ahead-nows, the high-fives, the down-lows. Even the too-slows.
He’d never watched a hand move quite like this before. But then again, he’d never been too slow either.
The ball left its grip, spinning and gyrating. Scoot clenched his teeth, braced himself, dug at the dirt, leapt, and swung.
CRACK
“HOME RUN!”
And oh how they cheered, and they cheered, and they cheered as Scoot ran, ran, ran, base to base, running at a speed unnecessary because there was no getting that ball back ever again, but he ran faster than he’d ever done before because at the plate his team had spilled out and they grabbed him and hurled him high into the air and they shouted all at once and all overlapping.
“Good boy, Scoot!”
And as Scoot was being told the words the whole stadium revolved around him and he saw banners with his face and banners with his name and one modestly-sized cardboard sign held aloft in the midst of thousands that read in clumsy marker GOOD BOY, SCOOT and he shuddered and sighed and wriggled with such joy that his team nearly dropped him, but as quickly as it had come it was already leaving and he relaxed into their hands once more.
It had been wonderful. But it wasn’t enough.
***
“Lift the cover,” croaked the agent from the floor. His arm was no longer straining; he’d given up the struggle to move. All the energy left in him was in his voice – still smoker’s-rough, but turning soft at the edges with fatigue.
Scoot lifted off the cover – that was the easy part. Holding the screwdriver in his teeth at the right angle had been child’s play; turning it with his tongue had been nearly tricky; this was something simpler than that.
“Now,” said the agent. “Cut the red wire. Not. The green one. NOT. GREEN.”
Scoot stared into the case of the bomb. Alright. This part might actually be difficult.
“Red wire,” said the agent. “Red.” He was fading fast. Scoot didn’t have the time to bring the bomb to him. He didn’t have the time to do anything but make a choice. Also he knew he couldn’t hesitate or ask for help or he might not hear the words.
So he bit the wire and tugged it loose with utmost confidence, and nothing exploded.
“Good,” said the agent, his pupils beginning to lose focus. “Good, Scoot. Good. Goodboy.”
And he was gone, and Scoot shivered all over in joy as he sat underneath the headquarters of the United Nations in a hidden sub-basement with a dead hero and forty dead henchmen and a dead mastermind who’d been killed by his own pet taipan and knew that by tomorrow every newspaper on the planet would have his name in them and maybe his picture and they could even have the words printed there millions of times and it was so very, very, very, very, very excellent.
And it was still leaving him, as soon as it had arrived.
The taipan hissed peevishly at him from the ductwork it had slithered into. He ignored it. It couldn’t speak the words.
***
Getting the airlock working was the hardest part – it had never been designed to interface with this kind of material before. But Scoot had already entered the override codes and disabled the safeties and gotten the rest of the crew into their suits.
They could afford to shed a little atmosphere and the alternative was not acceptable. He would not have his first trip into high orbit end in failure.
With a slow hiss, the valve at the far end of the corridor – a strange iris, crafted from a strange metal, shaped by strange minds – relaxed open, and the crew from the other structure floated into the airlock, two at a time. The last one in (the sixth – such a small consignment for such a vast vessel!) thumped at a control panel furiously until it shut behind them.
Scoot let them in. Of course he did. Even as they milled in confusion inside an alien spaceship; even as they watched the wreck of their own stricken vessel recede into the distance; even as they communicated with probe and clumsy mime that terran atmosphere seemed to be breathable; even when the first of them shed their suit’s helmet and revealed them to be very very large cats.
Scoot did not bark. Scoot’s fur did not stand on end. Scoot didn’t even growl.
“D*A&SL: *(Yure3qjlk,” said the alien, extended a cautious paw. And oh, oh, oh, how carefully Scoot shook it, for it was the first words spoken to a creature of Earth that were not of earth, and they were the words indeed, he knew intimately.
It lasted all the way down back the gravity well. It lasted all the way through the disembarkment. It lasted through the press conference.
It lasted until Scoot was home and in bed, and as he drifted off to sleep he felt it begin to drain and he knew by morning it would be gone again, and it was a mercy he was too deeply exhausted to feel strongly about that.
***
Scoot sat at his desk with his head on his paws and his brows twitching and he thought of the six years of his life, of the past year of his presidency.
He had heard the words nearly every day. Ever since he’d been nominated by all official political parties. Every day since he secured one hundred percent of the vote and an extra ten percent just because of the words. Every day since he’d stopped every genocide, ended every war, brought an end to economic injustice, turned the global carbon-negative, cloned the thylacine back to life, colonized space, decolonized earth, visited the planet of the &*ZXF?k;l, and learned the secret name of several gods.
Sometimes it lasted. Sometimes it didn’t. But it never stayed.
And sometimes after it left, Scoot sat at his desk like he was doing and he rested his head on his paws like he did and he thought of the small and very sturdy red button inside the locked drawer under a bulletproof glass case guarded by a passcode only he knew.
He would never push it. That would be bad. That would make him the opposite of the words, the dreaded thing, the thing he had never heard of.
It was just that sometimes on nights like this he liked to sit and think and wonder and what he wondered was things like this:
What if, in order for the words to truly matter, to truly STICK, to truly STAY, he had to know their opposite? If he’d never been a
B a d d o g
… then how was he supposed to know how good the words really were?
His tail was wagging. His tongue was hanging out.
And then he got an itch, had to chew on his haunch for a good forty seconds, and when he was done, the moment was passed and he was tired, so very tired.
Time for bed. There would be another night tomorrow.
So President Scoot curled himself up on the carpet of the Oval Office with his tail in his nose and dreamed, and whether his dreams were good or bad was his concern and nobody else’s, and if he found that liberating or terrifying, well, that was his business too.
The button did not dream. But it DID wait.