First Person Peculiar (11 page)

He had a point. With a couple of thousand Butterballs screaming
“Feed me!”
more and more frantically, it was almost impossible to think in there. We went up and down the rows of small stalls, captured the place on film and tape and disk and cube, then went back outside.

“That was impressive,” I admitted when we’d all gathered around Cotter again. “But I didn’t see any two million Butterballs in there. Where are the rest of them?”

“There are more than three hundred barns and other enclosures on the farm,” answered Cotter. “Furthermore, close to half a million are outside in pastures.”

“I don’t see anything but empty fields,” remarked Jake, waving a hand toward the pristine enclosures.

“We’re a huge farm, and we prefer to keep the Butterballs away from prying eyes. In fact, this barn was built only a month ago, when we finally decided to allow visitors on the premises. It is the only building that’s as close as a mile to any of our boundary lines.”

“You said that some of them were in pastures,” said Julie. “What do they eat?”

“Not grass,” answered Cotter. “They’re only outside because they’re multiplying so fast that we’re actually short of barns at the moment.” He paused. “If you looked carefully at them, you noticed that grazing is quite beyond their capabilities.” He held up a small golden pellet for us to see. “This is what they eat. It is totally artificial, created entirely from chemicals. Mr. MacDonald was adamant that no Butterball should ever eat any product that might nourish a human being. Their digestive systems were engineered to utilize this particular feed, which can provide nourishment to no other species on Earth.”

“As long as you tinkered with their digestive systems, why didn’t you make them shit-eaters?” asked Jake, only half-jokingly. “They could have served two purposes at once.”

“I assume that was meant in jest,” said Cotter, “but in point of fact, Mr. MacDonald considered it at one time. After all, some nourishment
doe
s remain in excrement—but alas, not enough. He wanted an animal that could utilize one hundred percent of what we fed it.”

“How smart are they?” asked one of the Brits. “When I was a child, I had a dog that always wanted me to feed it or pet it, but it never told me so.”

“Yes it did,” said Cotter. “It just didn’t use words.”

“Point taken,” said the Brit. “But I’d still like to know …”

“These are dumb farm animals,” said Cotter. “They do not think, they do not dream, they have no hopes or aspirations, they do not wish to become Archbishop. They just happen to be able to articulate a few words, not unlike many birds. Surely you don’t think Mr. MacDonald would create a sentient meat animal.”

“No, of course not,” interjected Julie. “But hearing them speak is still a bit of a shock.”

“I know,” said Cotter. “And that’s the
real
reason we’ve invited you here, why we’re inviting so many other press pools—to prepare the public.”

“That’s going to take a lot of preparation,” I said dubiously.

“We have to start somewhere,” said Cotter. “We have to let the people know about this particular anomaly. Men love to anthropomorphize, and a talking animal makes doing so that much easier. The consumers must be made to understand, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that these are unintelligent meat animals, that they do not know what their words mean, that they have no names and aren’t pets, that they do not mourn the loss of their neighbors any more than a cow or a goat does. They are humanity’s last chance—note that I did not even say humanity’s last
best
chance—and we cannot let the protestors and picketers we know will demonstrate against us go unanswered. No one will believe
our
answers, but they should believe the answers of the unbiased world press.”

“Yeah,” I said under my breath to Jake. “And if kids didn’t want to eat Bambi, or Henry the Turkey, or Penelope Pig, how is anyone going to make them dig into Talky the Butterball, who actually exists?”

“I heard that,” said Cotter sharply, “and I must point out that the children who will survive because of the Butterballs will almost certainly never have been exposed to Bambi or Henry or any of the others.”

“Maybe not for a year or two,” I replied, unimpressed. “But before long you’ll be selling Butterburgers on every street corner in the States.”

“Not until we’ve fulfilled our mission among the less fortunate peoples of the world—and by that time the people you refer to should be prepared to accept the Butterballs.”

“Well, you can hope,” I said.

“If it never comes to that, it doesn’t really matter,” said Cotter with an elaborate shrug. “Our mission is to feed Earth’s undernourished billions.”

We both knew it would come to that, and sooner than anyone planned, but if he didn’t want to argue it, that was fine with me. I was just here to collect a story.

“Before I show you the processing plant, are there any further questions?” asked Cotter.

“You mean the slaughterhouse, right?” said Jake.

“I mean the processing plant,” said Cotter severely. “Certain words are not in our lexicon.”

“You’re actually going to show us Butterballs being …
processed
?” asked Julie distastefully.

“Certainly not,” answered Cotter. “I’m just going to show you the plant. The process is painless and efficient, but I see no value in your being able to report that you watched our animals being prepared for market.”

“Good!” said Julie with obvious relief.

Cotter gestured to an open bus that was parked a few hundred meters away, and it soon pulled up. After everybody was seated, he climbed on and stood next to the driver, facing us.

“The plant is about five miles away, at almost the exact center of the farm, insulated from curious eyes and ears.”

“Ears?”
Julie jumped on the word. “Do they scream?”

Cotter smiled. “No, that was just an expression. We are quite humane, far more so than any meat packing plant that existed before us.”

The bus hit a couple of bumps that almost sent him flying, but he hung on like a trooper and continued bombarding us with information, about three-quarters of it too technical or too self- serving to be of any use.

“Here we are,” he announced as the bus came to a stop in front of the processing plant, which dwarfed the barn we had just left. “Everyone out, please.”

We got off the bus. I sniffed the air for the odor of fresh blood, not that I knew what it smelled like, but of course I couldn’t detect any. No blood, no rotting flesh, nothing but clean, fresh air. I was almost disappointed.

There were a number of small pens nearby, each holding perhaps a dozen Butterballs.

“You have perhaps noticed that we have no vehicles capable of moving the hundreds and thousands of units we have to process each day?” asked Cotter, though it came out more as a statement than a question.

“I assume they are elsewhere,” said the lady from India.

“They were inefficient,” replied Cotter. “We got rid of them.”

“Then how do you move the Butterballs?”

Cotter smiled. “Why clutter all our roads with vehicles when they aren’t necessary?” he said, tapping out a design on his pocket computer. The main door to the processing plant slid open, and I noticed that the Butterballs were literally jumping up and down with excitement.

Cotter walked over to the nearest pen. “Who wants to go to heaven?” he asked.

“Go to heaven!”
squeaked a Butterball.

“Go to heaven!”
rasped another.

Soon all twelve were repeating it almost as if it were a chant, and I suddenly felt like I was trapped inside some strange surrealistic play.

Finally Cotter unlocked their pen and they hopped—I hadn’t seen any locomote at the other barn—up to the door and into the plant.

“It’s as simple as that,” said Cotter. “The money we save on vehicles, fuel and maintenance allows us to—”

“There’s nothing simple about it!” snapped Julie. “This is somewhere between blasphemy and obscenity! And while we’re at it,” she added suspiciously, “how can a dumb animal possibly know what heaven is?”

“I repeat, they are not sentient,” said Cotter. “Just as you have code words for your pet dog or cat, we have them for the Butterballs. Ask your dog if he wants a treat, and he’ll bark or sit up or do whatever you have conditioned him to do. We have conditioned the Butterballs in precisely the same way. They don’t know the meaning of the word ‘heaven’ any more than your pet knows the meaning of the word ‘treat,’ but we’ve conditioned them to associate the word with good feelings and with entry into the processing plant. They will happily march miles through a driving rain to ‘go to heaven.’”

“But heaven is such a … a
philosophical
concept,” persisted the Indian woman. “Even to use it seems—”

“Your dog knows when he’s been good,” interrupted Cotter, “because you tell him so, and he believes you implicitly. And he knows when he’s been bad, because you show him what he’s done to displease you and you call him a bad dog. But do you think he understands the abstract philosophical concepts of good and bad?”

“All right,” said Julie. “You’ve made your point. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not see the inside of the slaughterhouse.”

“The processing plant,” he corrected her. “And of course you don’t have to enter it if it will make you uncomfortable.”

“I’ll stay out here too,” I said. “I’ve seen enough killing down in Paraguay and Uruguay.”

“We’re not killing anything,” explained Cotter irritably. “I am simply showing you—”

“I’ll stay here anyway,” I cut him off.

He shrugged. “As you wish.”

“If you have no vehicles to bring them to the plant,” asked the Brit, approaching the entrance, “how do you move the … uh, the finished product out?”

“Through a very efficient system of underground conveyers,” said Cotter. “The meat is stored in subterranean freezers near the perimeter of the property until it is shipped. And now …” He opened a second pen, offered them heaven, and got pretty much the same response.

Poor bastards,
I thought as I watched them hop and waddle to the door of the plant.
In times gone by, sheep would be
enticed into the slaughterhouse by a trained ram that they blindly
followed. But leave it to us to come up with an even better reward
for happily walking up to the butcher block: heaven itself.

The Butterballs followed the first dozen into the belly of the building, and the rest of the pool followed Cotter in much the same way. There was a parallel to be drawn there, but I wasn’t interested enough to draw it.

I saw Julie walking toward one of the pens. She looked like she didn’t want any company, so I headed off for a pen in the opposite direction. When I got there, four or five of the Butterballs pressed up against the fence next to me.

“Feed me!”

“Feed me!”

“Pet me!”

“Feed me!”

Since I didn’t have any food, I settled for petting the one who was more interested in being petted than being fed.

“Feel good?” I asked idly.

“Feel good!”
it said.

I almost did a double take at that.

“You’re a hell of a mimic, you know that?” I said.

No reply.

“Can you say what I say?” I asked.

Silence.

“Then how the hell did you learn to say it feels good, if you didn’t learn it just now from me?”

“Pet me!”

“Okay, okay,” I said, scratching it behind a tiny ear.

“Very good!”

I pulled my hand back as if I’d had an electric shock. “I never said the word ‘very.’ Where did you learn it?”
And more to
the point, how did you learn to partner it with ‘good’?

Silence.

For the next ten minutes I tried to get it to say something different. I wasn’t sure what I was reaching for, but the best I got was a
“Pet me!”
and a pair of
“Goods”
.

“All right,” I said at last. “I give up. Go play with your friends, and don’t go to heaven too soon.”

“Go to heaven!”
it said, hopping up and down.
“Go to
heaven!”

“Don’t get so excited,” I said. “It’s not what it’s cracked up to be.”

“See Mama!”
it squealed.

“What?”

“See God! See Mama!”

Suddenly I knew why MacDonald was being treated for depression. I didn’t blame him at all.

I hurried back to the slaughterhouse, and when Cotter emerged alone a moment later I walked up to him.

“We have to talk,” I said, grabbing him by the arm.

“Your colleagues are all inside inspecting the premises,” he said, trying to pull himself loose from my grip. “Are you sure you wouldn’t care to join them?”

“Shut up and listen to me!” I said. “I just had a talk with one of your Butterballs.”

“He told you to feed him?”

“He told me that he would see God when he went to heaven.”

Cotter swallowed hard. “Oh, shit—another one!”

“Another one of
what
?” I demanded. “Another sentient one?”

“No, of course not,” said Cotter. “But as often as we impress the need for absolute silence among our staff, they continue to speak to each other in front of the Butterballs, or even to the Butterballs themselves. Obviously this one heard someone saying that God lives in heaven. It has no concept of God, of course; it probably thinks God is something good to eat.”

“He thinks he’s going to see his mother, too,” I said.

“He’s a
mimic!”
said Cotter severely. “Surely you don’t think he can have any memory of his mother? For Christ’s sake, he was weaned at five weeks!”

“I’m just telling you what he said,” I replied. “Like it or not, you’ve got a hell of a P.R. problem: Just how many people do you want him saying it to?”

“Point him out to me,” said Cotter, looking panicky. “We’ll process him at once.”

“You think he’s the only one with a vocabulary?” I asked.

“One of the very few, I’m sure,” said Cotter.

“Don’t be
that
sure,” said Julie, who had joined us while I was talking to Cotter. She had an odd expression on her face, like someone who’s just undergone a religious experience and wishes she hadn’t. “Mine looked at me with those soft brown eyes and asked me, very gently and very shyly, not to eat it.”