be concealed from canine olfactory perception. Their noses revealed to them more clues than all the wits of all the detectives ever born.
But they found no hint of a hidden laboratory.
Now, on this night of nights, when the Wire hummed with news, Bella sensed history in the making. A history different from any they had ever imagined.
Something was happening out there.
Something big. Something wonderful.
Just today, in Pinehaven, Kipp had found a boy who could use the Wire.
Vulcan, a German shepherd, had reported a previously unknown community of their kind in Southern California.
Caesar and Cleo Ishigawa of San Jose had produced a healthy litter of six.
Just half an hour earlier, word came that Lucy and Ricky, companions of Nancy Peltz, of Vallejo, were parents of five pups.
More of their kind had been born in one day than in the past three or four years combined.
And now, from out of Oregon issued a transmission on the Wire alike to that from Vulcan in distant La Jolla.
According to a mixed breed named Ginger, a community of forty lived in and around the town of Corvallis.
The Oregon group had long hoped to make contact with other communities on the Wire, which they called “the Network.” They had tried for years without success—until now.
Event by event, Bella became more excited.
While the Montell family slept, Bella moved restlessly through the house.
She went to her water dish.
She went to the kitchen drawer where her cookies were kept.
She went to her toy box in a corner of the family room.
She didn’t want water or cookies or a toy.
At first she didn’t understand what she wanted.
And then she knew. She wanted to run.
All of the good news had incited in her such joy that she could not be still.
Bella ran through the family room. Sprinted along the first-floor hall.
She raced around and around the living room, leaping on and then off sofas and armchairs.
Into the kitchen. Through the pet door. Across the porch. She circled the yard again and again, as if it were a racetrack.
When she returned to the house, she collapsed on the cool tile of the kitchen floor, tongue lolling, panting, happy.
Later, after she’d recovered and had a drink, she considered sprinting upstairs.
She wanted to wake Andrea and Bill. Larinda, Sam, Dennis, Milly. Her people. Her loves.
She yearned to share her joy with them.
But she could not share.
They didn’t know how very intelligent she was, and she could not speak, and they weren’t on the Wire.
She loved them, and they loved her, and if she could have no more, what she had was more than enough.
Yet right now, her great joy rested on the quiet sadness of loneliness.
Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beauty was nonetheless a hard place, indifferent to its creatures.
It was mind that mattered, mind that cared, mind that loved, the best works of the mind that changed this hard world for the better.
Mind—and the heart—had bonded people and dogs for tens of thousands of years. They had formed an alliance for survival and a covenant of affection against the darkness of the world.
If the minds of dogs were undergoing change, enlightenment, then the bond between them and people might one day be even more satisfying than it had been for millennia.
As she composed another Bellagram to report the existence of the community in Corvallis, Oregon, she hoped that one day more people than just the boy Woody would be on the Wire.
She hoped that, when the time was right, Andrea and Bill and Larinda and Sam and Dennis and Milly would know her in her fullness.
She hoped that she would live long enough to see the mystery of the Mysterium solved.
She hoped to know why she’d been born as she was, what it all meant, where it was all going.
From her toy box, she retrieved a hard rubber bone infused with an interesting flavor.
For all that she was, she was no less a dog.
The toy bone was conceived by the human mind, crafted by human hands, given to Bella as an expression of love, so it comforted her even when she was alone, while her family slept.
89
Woody was in the world as he had never been before, embarrassed neither by himself nor others. As he’d shared his fear of closeness with Kipp, the dog had shared his need for closeness, for touching and sharing. Knots deep in