Read Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories Online
Authors: Terry Bisson
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Collections & Anthologies
The dawn was already halfway down the mountains by the time we locked out. Soon the raw sunlight would be racing, or at least loping, across the crater floor. The station would be livable for several more weeks, at least until mid-morning; but as we didn’t have proper suits for a sunlight EVA, even a dawn EVA, we would have to hurry.
It was my first EVA in years. One of the lunies and I were the pallbearers (only two are needed on the Moon), while Hvarlgen followed in her fat-tired EVA chair. Even though we had decompressed Dr. Kim’s body as slowly as possible, he had still swelled in the vacuum. His face was filled out and he looked almost young.
We carried him a hundred meters across the crater floor, to a fairly flat stone (flat stones are rare on the Moon), following the instructions we had found in the envelope. Dr. Kim had picked out his grave site from his bed in East.
We laid him face-up on the table-shaped rock, the way they used to lay Indians so the vultures could swoop down to eat their hearts. Only here was a sky too deep for vultures. Hvarlgen read a few more words, and we started back. The crater floor was half lit by the mountains to the west. The sunlight had painted them from peak to foot; so that we cast long shadows—the “wrong” way. In a few weeks, as noon approached, with its 250-degree temperatures, it would cook Dr. Kim into bone and ash and vapor; until then he would lie in state letting the stars which he had studied for over half a century study him.
* * *
When we locked back in, the chimes for incoming were ringing. Here’s Johnny and Sidrath had timed it all perfectly. Hvarlgen rolled off on two wheels to meet them; I was in no hurry. By the time I got to Grand Central, it was empty—everyone was greeting the
Diana
at South. I walked back down the tube to East. The bowl was gone; it had been returned to Other for Sidrath’s arrival. But the Shadow didn’t seem to notice. He was standing at the foot of the bed, no longer faded. For the first time he seemed to be looking directly at me. I didn’t know whether to say hello or goodbye. The Shadow seemed to be receding faster and faster, and me with him. I lost my balance and fell to one knee just as I “felt” what came to be known, much later, around the world, as the Brush.
III
Four days short of eleven months later, there was a knock at the door of my Road Lord.
“Major Bewley?”
“Call me Colonel,” I said.
It was Here’s Johnny. He was wearing a faux leather suit that somehow told me he had gone ahead and taken retirement. I wasn’t surprised. He was on his way to Los Angeles to live with his sister. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
“Better than that,” I said. “You’re spending the night.”
It was almost as if we were friends, and at my age almost is as good as the real thing, almost. I cleared a place on the couch (my picture—the same one—was in an eighteen-inch stack of magazines) and he sat down. Here’s Johnny had gained twenty pounds, which often happens to lunies when they lock in for good. I put on a fresh pot of coffee. It must have been the smell of the coffee that made us both think of Hvarlgen.
“She’s in Reykjavik,” Here’s Johnny said. “When the film didn’t show anything, that was it for her. The last straw. She left the rest of it up to Sidrath and the Commission.”
“The rest of what?” There was no more Shadow; both the image and the substance in the bowl had disappeared with the Brush. As promised. “What did they have left to do?”
“All the surveys, interviews, population samples. All the stuff you’ve read about the Brush; it all came from Sidrath and the Commission. But without Hvarlgen’s help. Or yours, I happened to notice.”
“I’d had enough, myself,” I said. “I felt like we were all getting a little crazy. That whole week was like a dream. Plus, there seemed at the time, to be nothing to say. What I had experienced was, literally, as you know—as we all know now—indescribable. Since my contract was up, I sort of cut and ran because I didn’t want to be roped into some elaborate effort to figure it all out.”
“And you thought you were the only one.”
“Well, didn’t we all? At first, anyway.”
It had taken several months of research to determine, positively, that every man, woman, and child on and off the planet (plus, it was now thought, a high percentage of dogs) had experienced the Brush at the same instant. We were no more able to describe it than the dogs were. It was intensely sensual but in no way physical, brilliantly colorful but not visible, musical but not quite a sound—an entirely new sensation, indescribable and unforgettable at the same time. The best description I heard was from an Indian filmmaker who said it was as if someone had painted his soul with light. That’s poetic license, of course. It had happened in less than an instant, but it was days before anyone spoke of it, and weeks before the SETI commission realized it was the communication we had been promised.
By then it was only a memory. And lucky it was that we all had felt it—otherwise, some of us would be spending the next few centuries trying to describe it to those who hadn’t. A new religion, maybe. As it was, most people on the planet were going about their business as if it had never happened, while a few were still trying to figure out what the Brush meant to the children. And the dogs.
* * *
“It was a bitter disappointment to Hvarlgen,” said Here’s Johnny. It was late; we were sitting outside, having a whiskey, waiting to catch the sunset.
“I know,” I said. “To her, it was an insult. She called it the Brush-off. I can understand her point of view. We are finally contacted by another, maybe the only other life-form in the Universe, but it has nothing to say. No more than a hello, how are you. A wave from a passing ship, she called it.”
“Maybe because it happened to everybody,” Here’s Johnny said.
“I can understand that, too,” I said. “We all thought it was going to be just for us.”
One of my unofficial grandsons rode up on a bicycle carrying a turtle. I gave him a dollar for it, and put it into a polyboard box under the trailer with two other turtles. “I pay the kids for the ones they pick up off the road,” I said. “Then after sundown I let them go, away from the highway.”
“Me, I’m more optimistic,” Here’s Johnny said. “Maybe the children who experienced the Brush will grow up different. Maybe smarter or less violent.”
“Or maybe the dogs,” I said.
“What do you think?” he asked. “You were, after all, the first contact.”
“I was just the pattern for the protocol,” I said. “I got the same communication as everyone else, no more or no less. I’m convinced of that. I was just used to, you know, set up the tuning.”
“You weren’t disappointed?”
“I was disappointed that Dr. Kim didn’t get to experience it. But who knows, maybe he did. As for me, I’m an old man. I don’t expect things to mean anything. I just sort of enjoy them. Look there.”
Off to the west, a range of barren peaks was hurling itself between Slab City and the nearest star, painting our trailers with new darkness. The clash of photons set up a barrage of colors in the sky overhead. We watched the sun set in silence; then I got one end of the box and Here’s Johnny got the other, and we dragged it out to a pile of boulders at the edge of the desert and deposited the turtles into the still-warm sand.
“You do this every night?”
“Why not?” I said. “Maybe it’s turtles all the way down.”
But Here’s Johnny didn’t get the joke. Which goes to show, as Chuck Berry once said, you never can tell.
Afterword
I
CAME TO THE SHORT STORY BOTH EARLY AND LATE.
In 1964, after the birth of my oldest son, Nathaniel, I wrote a story about a kid born with wings. “George” won honorable mention in a
Story
magazine contest and made me fifty dollars. After a couple of false starts, though, I gave up the form entirely.
Then in 1988, after three or four published novels, I wrote “Over Flat Mountain.” It was to me not really a story but the fictional illustration of a conceit—the Appalachians being all rolled up into one mountain; a goof, if you will. By this time I was a published SF and fantasy novelist, and when Ellen Datlow asked me if I had ever tried short fiction, I sent her this one with the warning that it was “not an
OMNI
story.”
She told me she would decide what was and what wasn’t an
OMNI
story, thank you very much. And bought it. There’s nothing like an eighteen-hundred-dollar sale to revive an interest in short fiction.
The rest of the stories in this book were written between 1988 and 1993.
“The Two Janets” is, like “Over Flat Mountain,” the fictional illustration of a conceit that turned into a short story in spite of itself. Owensboro is my hometown.
“They’re Made out of Meat” has its inspiration in Allen Ginsberg’s reply to an interviewer who kept prattling about their souls communing. “We’re just meat talking to meat,” the poet corrected him.
“The Coon Suit” came to me in a vivid daydream while driving through Oldham County, Kentucky, twenty-five years ago, and never went away. I find most horror unintentionally funny; this story, which I thought funny, wound up in a horror anthology.
“Canción” is my attempt at capturing the unaccountable sadness I felt watching street singers in Madrid one Christmas Eve. It is (also unaccountably, perhaps) one of my favorites.
“Volunteer” was originally published as “Carl’s Lawn & Garden.” The true title came to me late.
I thought of “Partial People” while driving over a box.
“Are There Any Questions?” is what you might call a throwaway.
I heard of a Chicago neighborhood ringed by pollutants called “the toxic doughnut” while I was reading Shirley Jackson’s biography; the two influences converged in a story.
“By Permit Only” is still another environmental short short. It was written over Christmas, which probably accounts for its overheated sentimentality.
It’s probably no coincidence that so many of my environmental stories are short shorts. Save a tree! Even beyond the paper, think how much imaginative timber is wasted on plot, background, character, action, and atmosphere. Better to dispense with them all! Like the lemon cream pie on
Saturday Night Live
(“No lemon, no cream, just pie”) these short shorts are all story.
I associate the title story with my daughter, Kristen. We were driving on an interstate with beautiful timbered medians when I said, “I just got an idea for a story.” “What is it?” she asked. “All I know for sure is the title,” I said. I agree with Ted Mooney, author of the overlooked SF (well, sort of) masterpiece
Easy Travel to Other Planets
, that the title is (or can be) the target toward which you shoot the arrow of the story. In this case, a good title, “Bears Discover Fire,” gave me my best shot ever, going on to win the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Sturgeon awards, being published in Japan, Germany, and Russia, and even making a college lit anthology.
“They’re Made Out of Meat” was a Nebula nominee; “Press Ann” was a Hugo nominee; and “Next” won
The Chronic Rift
TV show’s coveted Round Table award (a plastic device from a pizza box). Adapted for the stage, it was directed and produced at New York’s West Bank Theater by Donna Gentry (along with “They’re Made out of Meat” and “Next”).
“Two Guys From the Future” is my homage to Classical Time Travel Paradox Light Romantic Comedy.
Years ago in Louisville, right after “George,” I wrote a story called “Mr. Zone” about a man to whom nothing ever happened. The story was never published, but the character turned up (as Fox) in “England Underway.”
Sheila Williams of
Asimov
’
s
has been kind enough to describe my short fiction as warm and charming. “Necronauts” is my attempt to undermine that image. Its origin is in a project by artist Wayne Barlowe; he and I once tried to think of a story to illustrate a series of paintings and drawings he called his “Guide to Hell.” The story reaffirms for me how much we all owe to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
“The Message” is more of the old-time mad scientist stuff. Or maybe it’s “The Coon Suit” minus the dogs. Or maybe it’s “Bears” without fire (or hair).
* * *
Every once in a while I find myself compelled to revisit the old dominions of hard SF—my home country as a reader, if not a writer.
Voyage to the Red Planet
was that among my novels; in the stories it is “The Shadow Knows.” Somehow, these visits home always seem to start with an old fellow returning to space. “Shadow,” my longest story, and “Meat,” one of my shortest, both deal with the same venerable SF theme: first contact.
* * *
It was in the midst of writing these stories, that I found “George” in the files of my literary ex-mother-in-law and read it, for the first time in years, with some trepidation. I was pleased to find that though I wouldn’t write it again, I wouldn’t change a word in it. Since my first story was noticed (if never published) by Whit Burnett of
Story
magazine, it is my connection with another era in literature; that also pleases me. And it is reassuring to me in another way.
I have sometimes felt that I was a gate-crasher in the world of SF, passing off odd mainstream works as fantasy and science fiction in order to get them published. “George” assures me that I have, in fact, for better or worse, been a fantasy writer from jump, engaged in a long process of coming home.
I hope you like these stories, the contrivances of my heart.
Also by Terry Bisson
Numbers Don’t Lie
Now you can get Terry Bisson’s three Wilson Wu novelettes in one place, including the Hugo-nominated “Get Me to the Church on Time.” Wilson’s been a rock musician, an engineer, and a pastry chef; he graduated law school and passed the bar on the first try. Drawn into adventure by his friend Irv, another lawyer with a talent for stumbling on strange phenomena, Wilson crunches the numbers. Together they find a junkyard dedicated to Volvos that conceals a rift in the space-time continuum, and a beaded seat cushion in a vacant lot that heralds the premature collapse of the universe. And when an airport baggage claim works like clockwork . . . ? Check out the math (Bisson has scrupulously illustrated the stories with formulas, all of which have been reviewed for “elegance” by famed mathematician Rudy Rucker), and discover for yourself that
Numbers Don’t Lie
.