Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (505 page)

He turns back to the first path. Once again he is drawn to the vision of annihilation. An end to breeding and living and dying, an end to the mad ceaseless activity that covers the earth. Perhaps this is what God requires of him.

He remembers Sarah, her desire to lie with him. She thought him powerless; very well, he will show her something of power. Flame will consume her descendants, all the children he had been unable to give her.

The moon spins before him, fragments into a thousand pieces. He understands that his vision is not an allegory but real, that people will become so strong they can destroy the moon.

His head pounds. He is not powerless at all. He is the most powerful man in the world. All the people he has seen in his travels, the bakers and learned men and farmers and housewives and bandits, all of them depend for their lives on his next word.

He thinks of Sarah again, her tangled hair, her breath warm on his cheek. If he lets the world live all her children will be his, although she will not know it. Every person in the world will be his child. He can choose life, for himself and for everyone; he can do what he was chosen to do and heal the world.

The light blazes and dies. He looks up at the sultan and his men and says, calmly, “I will choose Islam.”

* * * *

Copyright © 1994 by Lisa Goldstein.

(1951– )

Apparently, everyone wants to claim Jim Kelly as one of their own. He’s certainly affable and articulate, good on a panel, an interesting conversationalist—and a terrific short story writer—but over the years it’s been claimed that he was a cyberpunk writer, an anti-cyberpunk humanist, and a writer of pure hard SF, for instance. It’s not that he hasn’t done any of those things: Jim’s story “Solstice” appeared in Bruce Sterling’s anthology
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
(1985), and he was a part of the humanist Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop, and “Think Like a Dinosaur” is as hard as an SF story can be. But none of those things really defines him, other than a tendency to be free-thinking and use a variety of stylistic approaches in his writing well enough to have won two Hugos.

After graduating from Notre Dame with a degree in English Literature, Jim worked as a proposal writer for five years, until he was able to write full-time. He attended Clarion twice, in 1974 and 1976; his first story sale fell in between the two: “Dea Ex Machina” to
Galaxy
in 1975. He didn’t sell another story until “Death Therapy” in 1978, but since then he’s been published consistently. Although he primarily writes stories and essays (he has a regular column in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
), Jim has written four novels,
Planet of Whispers
(1984), its sequel
Look into the Sun
(1989), Freedom Beach (1985, with John Kessel); and Wildlife (1994). He’s also written poems and plays, and co-edited a number of anthologies with John Kessel.

Recently, he’s been posting two weekly podcasts, Free Reads and James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod.

Jim is heavily involved in working with new writers. He’s on the faculty at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. He frequently teaches and participates in workshops, such as Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop and Viable Paradise, and he is vice chair of the Clarion Foundation, which oversees Clarion. He has also served on the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts since 1998, and chaired the council from 2003–2006.

“Think Like a Dinosaur” is Jim’s most famous story, and a Hugo Award winner. The story is a direct response to Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations (p. 396).

First published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, June 1995

Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it—naked. She tottered out of the assembler, trying to balance in Tuulen Station’s delicate gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one motion, then eased her onto the float. Three years on another planet had transformed Kamala. She was leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters long and there were four parallel scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps some Gendian’s idea of beautification. But what struck me most was the darting strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock her. It was as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had learned to think like an alien.

“Welcome back.” The float’s whisper rose to a
whoosh
as I walked it down the hallway.

She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she would have. Lots of migrators are devastated when they come out of the assembler; it’s because there is no transition. A few seconds ago Kamala was on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call epsilon Leo, and now she was here in lunar orbit. She was almost home; her life’s great adventure was over.

“Matthew?” she said.

“Michael.” I couldn’t help but be pleased that she remembered me. After all, she had changed my life.

* * * *

I’ve guided maybe three hundred migrations—comings
and
goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri’s is the only quantum scan I’ve ever pirated. I doubt that the dmos care; I suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81 million per mm3. She could play the nagas-varam, a kind of bamboo flute. Her father came from Thana, near Bombay, and her favorite flavor of chewyfrute was watermelon and she’d had five lovers and when she was eleven she had wanted to be a gymnast but instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-nine had volunteered to go to the stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew she could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Sillom translated her into a superluminal signal. She understood what it meant to balance the equation.

I first met her on June 22, 2069. She shuttled over from Lunex’s L1 port and came through our airlock at promptly 10:15, a small, roundish woman with black hair parted in the middle and drawn tight against her skull. They had darkened her skin against epsilon Leo’s UV; it was the deep blue-black of twilight. She was wearing a striped clingy and velcro slippers to help her get around for the short time she’d be navigating our .2 micrograv.

“Welcome to Tuulen Station.” I smiled and offered my hand. “My name is Michael.” We shook. “I’m supposed to be a sapientologist but I also moonlight as the local guide.”

“Guide?” She nodded distractedly. “Okay.” She peered past me, as if expecting someone else.

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said, “the dinos are in their cages.”

Her eyes got wide as she let her hand slip from mine. “You call the Hanen dinos?”

“Why not?” I laughed. “They call us babies. The weeps, among other things.”

She shook her head in amazement. People who’ve never met a dino tended to romanticize them: the wise and noble reptiles who had mastered superluminal physics and introduced Earth to the wonders of galactic civilization. I doubt Kamala had ever seen a dino play poker or gobble down a screaming rabbit. And she had never argued with Linna, who still wasn’t convinced that humans were psychologically ready to go to the stars.

“Have you eaten?” I gestured down the corridor toward the reception rooms. “Yes…I mean, no.” She didn’t move. “I am not hungry.”

“Let me guess. You’re too nervous to eat. You’re too nervous to talk, even. You wish I’d just shut up, pop you into the marble, and beam you out. Let’s just get this part the hell over with, eh?”

“I don’t mind the conversation, actually.”

“There you go. Well, Kamala, it is my solemn duty to advise you that there are no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Gend. And no chicken vindaloo. What’s my name again?”

“Michael?”

“See, you’re not
that
nervous. Not one taco, or a single slice of eggplant pizza. This is your last chance to eat like a human.”

“Okay.” She did not actually smile—she was too busy being brave—but a corner of her mouth twitched. “Actually, I would not mind a cup of tea.”

“Now, tea they’ve got.” She let me guide her toward reception room D; her slippers
snicked
at
the velcro carpet. “Of course, they brew it from lawn clippings.”

“The Gendians don’t keep lawns. They live underground.”

“Refresh my memory.” I kept my hand on her shoulder; beneath the clingy, her muscles were rigid. “Are they the ferrets or the things with the orange bumps?”

“They look nothing like ferrets.”

We popped through the door bubble into reception D, a compact rectangular space with a scatter of low, unthreatening furniture. There was a kitchen station at one end, a closet with a vacuum toilet at the other. The ceiling was blue sky; the long wall showed a live view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline, baking in the late June sun. Kamala had just finished her doctorate at MIT.

I opaqued the door. She perched on the edge of a couch like a wren, ready to flit away.

While I was making her tea, my fingernail screen flashed. I answered it and a tiny Silloin came up in discreet mode. She didn’t look at me; she was too busy watching arrays in the control room. =A problem,= her voice buzzed in my earstone, =most negligible, really. But we will have to void the last two from today’s schedule. Save them at Lunex until first shift tomorrow. Can this one be kept for an hour?=

“Sure,” I said. “Kamala, would you like to meet a Hanen?” I transferred Silloin to a dino-sized window on the wall. “Silloin, this is Kamala Shastri. Silloin is the one who actually runs things. I’m just the doorman.”

Silloin looked through the window with her near eye, then swung around and peered at Kamala with her other. She was short for a dino, just over a meter tall, but she had an enormous head that teetered on her neck like a watermelon balancing on a grapefruit. She must have just oiled herself because her silver scales shone. =Kamala, you will accept my happiest intentions for you?= She raised her left hand, spreading the skinny digits to expose dark crescents of vestigial webbing.

“Of course, I.…”

=And you will permit us to render you this translation?=

She straightened. “Yes.”

=Have you questions ?=

I’m sure she had several hundred, but at this point was probably too scared to ask. While she hesitated, I broke in. “Which came first, the lizard or the egg?”

Silloin ignored me. =It will be excellent for you to begin when?=

“She’s just having a little tea,” I said, handing her the cup. “I’ll bring her along when she’s done. Say an hour?”

Kamala squirmed on the couch. “No, really, it will not take me.…”

Sillom showed us her teeth, several of which were as long as piano keys. =That would be most appropriate, Michael. = She closed; a gull flew through the space where her window had been.

“Why did you do that?” Kamala’s voice was sharp.

“Because it says here that you have to wait your turn. You’re not the only migrator we’re sending this morning.” This was a lie, of course; we had had to cut the schedule because Jodi Latchaw, the other sapientologist assigned to Tuulen, was at the University of Hipparchus presenting our paper on the Hanen concept of identity. “Don’t worry, I’ll make the time fly.”

For a moment, we looked at each other. I could have laid down an hour’s worth of patter; I’d done that often enough. Or I could have drawn her out on why she was going: no doubt she had a blind grandma or second cousin just waiting for her to bring home those artificial eyes, not to mention potential spin-offs which could well end tuberculosis, famine, and premature ejaculation, blah, blah, blah. Or I could have just left her alone in the room to read the wall. The trick was guessing how spooked she really was.

“Tell me a secret,” I said.

“What?”

“A secret, you know, something no one else knows.”

She stared as if I’d just fallen off Mars.

“Look, in a little while you’re going someplace that’s what…three hundred and ten light years away? You’re scheduled to stay for three years. By the time you come back, I could easily be rich, famous, and elsewhere; we’ll probably never see each other again. So what have you got to lose? I promise not to tell.”

She leaned back on the couch, and settled the cup in her lap. “This is another test, right? After everything they have put me through, they still have not decided whether to send me.”

“Oh no, in a couple of hours you’ll be cracking nuts with ferrets in some dark Gendian burrow. This is just me, talking.”

“You are crazy.”

“Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It’s from the Greek:
logos
meaning word,
mania
meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love to chat is all. Tell you what, I’ll go first. If my secret isn’t juicy enough, you don’t have tell me anything.”

Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that whatever she was worrying about at the moment, it wasn’t being swallowed by the big blue marble.

“I was brought up Catholic,” I said, settling onto a chair in front of her. “I’m not anymore, but that’s not the secret. My parents sent me to Mary, Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run by a couple of old priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer. Father Tom taught physics, which I got a ‘D’ in, mostly because he talked like he had walnuts in his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught theology and had all the warmth of a marble pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.

“One night, just two weeks before my graduation, Father Tom and Mama Moogoo went out in their Chevy Minimus for ice cream. On the way home, Mama Moogoo pushed a yellow light and got broadsided by an ambulance. Like I said, she was old, a hundred and twenty something; they should’ve lifted her license back in the ’50s. She was killed instantly. Father Tom died in the hospital.

“Of course, we were all supposed to feel sorry for them and I guess I did a little, but I never really liked either of them and I resented the way their deaths had screwed things up for my class. So I was more annoyed than sorry, but then I also had this edge of guilt for being so uncharitable. Maybe you’d have to grow up Catholic to understand that. Anyway, the day after it happened they called an assembly in the gym and we were all there squirming on the bleachers and the cardinal himself telepresented a sermon. He kept trying to comfort us, like it had been our
parents
that had died. When I made a joke about it to the kid next to me, I got caught and spent the last week of my senior year with an in-school suspension.”

Kamala had finished her tea. She slid the empty cup into one of the holders built into the table.

“Want some more?” I said.

She stirred restlessly. “Why are you telling me this?”

“It’s part of the secret.” I leaned forward in my chair. “See, my family lived down the street from Holy Spirit Cemetery and in order to get to the carryvan line on McKinley Ave., I had to cut through. Now this happened a couple of days after I got in trouble at the assembly. It was around midnight and I was coming home from a graduation party where I had taken a couple of pokes of insight, so I was feeling sly as a philosopher-king. As I walked through the cemetery, I stumbled across two dirt mounds right next to each other. At first I thought they were flower beds, then I saw the wooden crosses. Fresh graves: here lies Father Tom and Mama Moogoo. There wasn’t much to the crosses: they were basically just stakes with crosspieces, painted white and hammered into the ground. The names were hand printed on them. The way I figure it, they were there to mark the graves until the stones got delivered. I didn’t need any insight to recognize a once in a lifetime opportunity. If I switched them, what were the chances anyone was going to notice? It was no problem sliding them out of their holes. I smoothed the dirt with my hands and then ran like hell.”

Until that moment, she’d seemed bemused by my story and slightly condescending toward me. Now there was a glint of alarm in her eyes. “That was a terrible thing to do,” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said, “although the dinos think that the whole idea of planting bodies in graveyards and marking them with carved rocks is weepy. They say there is no identity in dead meat, so why get so sentimental about it? Linna keeps asking how come we don’t put markers over our shit. But that’s not the secret. See, it’d been a warmish night in the middle of June, only as I ran, the air turned cold. Freezing, I could see my breath. And my shoes got heavier and heavier, like they had turned to stone. As I got closer to the back gate, it felt like I was fighting a strong wind, except my clothes weren’t flapping. I slowed to a walk. I know I could have pushed through, but my heart was thumping and then I heard this whispery seashell noise and I panicked. So the secret is I’m a coward. I switched the crosses back and I never went near that cemetery again. As a matter of fact,” I nodded at the walls of reception room D on Tuulen Station, “when I grew up, I got about as far away from it as I could.”

She stared as I settled back in my chair. “True story,” I said and raised my right hand. She seemed so astonished that I started laughing. A smile bloomed on her dark face and suddenly she was giggling too. It was a soft, liquid sound, like a brook bubbling over smooth stones; it made me laugh even harder. Her lips were full and her teeth were very white.

“Your turn,” I said, finally.