Read Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories Online
Authors: Terry Bisson
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Collections & Anthologies
Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories (14 page)
Canción Auténtica de Old Earth
“Q
UIETLY,” OUR GUIDE SAID.
Quietly it was.
We glided over ancient asphalt, past ghost-gray buildings that glowed in the old, cold light of a ruined Moon that seemed (even though we have all seen it in pictures a thousand times) too bright, too close, too dead.
Our way was lighted by our photon shadow guide, enclosing us and the street around us in an egg of softer, newer light.
At the end of a narrow lane, four streets came together in a small plaza. At one end was a stone church; at the other a glass and brick department store façade; both dating (my studies coming through at last) from the High European.
“There’s no one here,” one of us said.
“Listen . . .” said our guide.
There came a rumbling. A synthesizer on a rubber-tired wood-and-wire cart rolled into the plaza out of an alley beyond the department store. It was pulled by an old man in black sweaters, layered against the planet’s chill, and a boy in a leather jacket. An old woman, also all in black, and a smiling man who looked to be about forty walked behind. His smile was the smile of the blind.
“They still live here?” someone asked.
“Where else could they live?”
They stopped and a small yellow dog jumped down from the cart. The old man opened the synthesizer’s panels and connected its cables to a moldering fuel cell. Sparks flew. The boy took a dirty bundle from the cart and unwrapped a strat and a tambourine. He handed the tambourine to the blind man.
The old lady carried a black vinyl purse. She watched not them, but us; and I had the “feeling” she was trying to remember who we were.
The blind man was smiling past us, over us, as if at a larger crowd that had come into the plaza behind us. He was so convincing that I even “turned” to look. But of course, the plaza was empty. The city was empty except for us and them; the planet was empty. It had been empty for a thousand years, empty while the seas fell and rose then fell again; empty since the twist.
The old lady watched while our guide flowed out and narrowed in a crescent, arranging us in a half circle around the musicians. Her face was as rough as the stones of the front of the church; her façade as fallen in.
Except for the boy’s leather jacket, which was too shiny, everything they wore was old. Everything was cheap. Everything was black or gray.
The old man switched on the synthesizer and started to play chords in blocks of three. An electronic drumbeat kept time, a slow waltz. After a few bars the boy came in on the strat, high wailing tremolos.
“What about the singing?” someone complained in a whisper. “We came all the way across the Universe”—a slight exaggeration!—“for the singing.”
“They used to sing for the tourists,” our guide said. “Now there’s only the occasional special group such as ours.
The blind man began to dance. With the dog at his feet, he waltzed around our little half circle and then back, beating the tambourine first against the heel of one hand and then against his hip. Where his feet brushed our photon shadow guide, his shoes sparkled and looked almost new.
As suddenly as he had started, he stopped, and the old man spoke in a shout:
“Hidalgos y damas estimadas—”
It was a variant of Latin, which I could almost follow, Catalan or Spanish or Romany perhaps. Looking over us (just as the blind man had) the old man welcomed us back to our ancient, our ancestral home, where we would always be welcome, no matter how far we strayed, no matter how many centuries we stayed away, no matter what form it pleased us to take, etc.
“
Y ahora, una canción auténtica de
old Earth . . .” He gave a nod to the boy, who played a blues figure high in the cutaway—
The blind man looked up to where a moon,
the
Moon, half filled the sky; then rose toward it on his tiptoes, and opened his mouth revealing blackened shards of teeth; and there was the singing we had come halfway across the Universe to hear.
The little dog following him, he walked as he sang—up, then down our half circle. It was quite beautiful. It sounded just as we had always imagined it might. His eyes were closed (now that he was singing) but the dog looked directly at us, one by one, from our “feet” upward, as if searching for something or someone. I could only partly follow the words, but as the song rose and fell I knew he sang of the seas and of the cities, and of the centuries before the twist, when genetics locked our parents to a single planet and a single form. His song soared to a wail as he sang of the centuries after, and of the Universe that was ours at last. Listening, we huddled together inside our photon shadow guide; everything outside it, under that ruined Moon, even the little yellow dog, looked abandoned and lost.
“They are the last?” one of us whispered.
“According to them,” our guide said, in its low tone, “there will be no more.”
The song was over. The singer bowed until the echo had died away. When he straightened and opened his eyes, they were filled like little seas.
“The
canción auténtica
is said to be a very sad song,” said our guide.
The old lady stepped forward at last. She opened the purse and someone produced a coin: The two met with a
clink
as if a long chain had just been closed. The dog followed in her footsteps as she walked around our half circle, holding out the purse, and each of us put in the coin we had brought. I wished I had brought two. Though where would I have found another? God knows what she did with them anyway. There was no trade, no commerce, nothing left to buy.
“The
canción auténtica
seemed very sad to me,” someone said. I “nodded” in agreement. Certainly we can no longer sing, and it is said that since the twist we no longer feel sadness, but what is hearing a thing if not feeling it? What is the difference? How else account for the desolate colors where our faces might once have been?
Closing the purse, the old woman returned to stand beside the cart. The blind man seemed ready to sing again, but the old man began closing the synthesizer, folding its panels in on themselves. The boy wrapped the strat, and then the tambourine, in the blanket. The photon shadow guide pulled in, gathering us into its egg of light, while the dog watched.
It was time to go.
When the others began moving, I hesitated at the edge of the department store’s shadow, just out of the Moon’s light. The singer stood watching us leave with his shining eyes, dead as moons. It struck me that he hadn’t come for the coins, but for something else; someone to sing for. Perhaps he wanted us to applaud, but of course that was impossible; perhaps he was still hoping we would all come home someday.
The old man and the boy began pulling the cart away. The old woman called to the blind man and he turned and followed; the rumbling of the cart was all the guide he needed. The yellow dog stopped at the edge of the shadow, and turned, and looked back at me, as if he . . . as if I . . . But the blind man whistled, and the dog too was gone, following the cart; and without further ado I caught up with the others, and we left for our flyer, our starship, and our faraway home.
Partial People
Q
UESTIONS ARE BEING RAISED
about people only incompletely seen, or found in boxes, perhaps under benches. Lips and eyes stuck under theatre seats like gum. Feet
in shoes
in rude doorways.
Whatever mystery may have surrounded them can be cleared up at once. These are partial people.
Partial people are not entire in themselves. They do not merit your consideration though they may vie for it.
Partial people may seem to need medical attention because of lacking a leg, a side, an essential attribute, etc. Their partial quality [sic] is not, however, indication of a genuine medical condition. They do not need medical treatment, and if so, only a little.
They may (they will!) claim to be dying, but how can that be? As a wise man once said, how can they truly die, who have only partially lived.
Read my lips: These are partial people.
* * *
There has been speculation that they are from another or a parallel Universe. Science, however, has confirmed that this is not so; or that if they are from another Universe, it is not an important one.
The question of food is bound to come up. In general, it is best to pretend that partial people have already eaten.
Appearance is an issue. The grotesque and often unpresentable appearance of partial people may provoke discussion, particularly among those looking for something ugly to talk about. Such discussion should be kept to a minimum.
Traffic. It is rarely that they undertake to drive. Automotive controls, even with automatic transmission (most cars these days!), may prove daunting. Not to mention rentals.
Partial people can cause traffic delays, however: As Leslie R—— drove toward a box in his/her lane on G—— Ave. in M——, he/she was surprised to find an arm sticking out of it. He/she was able to judge from
the size
of the rest of the box, however, that it was not large enough to contain an entire person, and therefore was able to maintain speed and direction, thus avoiding lane changing with its potential for accidents.
To make a long story short, Leslie was not distracted by frantic hand waving. Crushing the box.
Partial people may try to pass themselves off as entire people. Sometimes all, or almost all, the customary visual aspects may be present. It may be an internal organ or aspect that is missing, not apparent to the eye (or
eyes
, among the entire). For this reason, it is best to assume that importunate strangers are partial people.
* * *
Travel. Partial people must pay full fare but may not go the whole way. This limits their travel.
Police experience with partial people is inconclusive. They are sometimes worth a beating, but rarely an Arrest.
Money. Partial people usually have a little but are certain to ask for more. On the subway do not take their cards.
In crowds, they stand cunningly so that three or four together may look like an entire person, or even two embracing. This marks the limit of their ability to cooperate.
Neither
p
is capitalized in “partial people.”
When they insist on having children, their children are also partial people (partial children). They hardly play.
They may claim to be veterans, especially those which are dis- or un-figured.
They may have trouble counting (being less than one to begin with). Their ideas may appear in contradiction to the ones you hold. Their speech is riddled with sentence fragments and futile attempts at dogma. Even a hello can lead to a loud harangue.
Frantic hand waving is not a friendly greeting with partial people. It is a blatant attempt to gain attention.
Do yourself and society a favor. Don’t be taken in. Just say no to partial people.
Thank you.
Volunteer
Let’s stop mourning for the good old days.
We are largely living in them still.
—Euell Gibbons
M
Y LAST WEEK ON THE JOB STARTED
(as usual) with a crisis. “Code Four, Gail,” Carl said, throwing me my cap. He never could pronounce my name. “It’s the Barbers, out in Whispering Woods subdivision, south of New Brunswick, just off Route One.” He backed the pickup to the shed end of the greenhouse and quizzed me while I threw equipment into the back. “Got the drip nozzles? Got the 4 plus 6? Got the Sylovan, the Di50Si? The lawn injectors? The Thumper, just in case? Oh, and a Dutch Elm chip for the mall. We might make it by there today.”
It was a bright, mournful June day. The traffic was colorful and hard. The roadsides were brilliant green; newly-painted for spring.
“Here we are, Gail. Whispering Woods.” We pulled past the wrought-iron gates between the two big laser maples with Dolby rustling leaves, and around the curved drive lined with big houses set on wide pseudolawns. It was all “nerf and turf” (that’s what Carl calls verdachip and astrolawn) until the Barbers’ house, at the turnaround.
Their lawn was not green but yellow-green. It was the only organic lawn in the sub. We put it in for them four years ago, and for two years it almost made it; then last summer we had to put it on twenty-four-hour IV, and now this looked like the end of the line.
Mrs. Barber was standing at the door looking worried. Her husband pulled in the drive just as we did. She must have called us both at the same time.
“Jesus,” Mr. Barber said as he got out of his Chrysler Iacocca and looked at his yellowing hundred thousand dollars ($104,066.29 to be precise; I sometimes watched Carl do the books). “It’s not too late, is it, Carl?”
“It’s never too late, Mr. Barber,” Carl said. The greenest part of the lawn made a crisscross pattern like an X-ray showing the underground grid where the drip saturators were buried; the rest of the grass was jaundiced-yellow. A darker brown edge ran all around the yard, like paper just before it bursts into flame.
“Code Six, Gail,” Carl said, revising his original assessment. “Give me 4.5 liters of straight Biuloformicaine on a speed inject. And be quick about it. I’ll load up the ambulofogger.”
The nutritank was built onto the side of the ranch-style home, disguised as a shed. I spilled in a four-can of Bi, added some Phishphlakes for good measure, and set the underpumps whining on Super. Out front, Carl trotted up and down the lawn with a Diprothemytaline sprayer, while the Barbers looked on, worried, from the doorway. A few neighbors had gathered at the curb, a mixture of concern and poorly disguised pleasure on their faces. I could tell that the Barbers and their organic lawn were not popular.
The quick Dipro fix gives a green flush to the skinny little leaves of the grass. I could hear them sigh with relief through the soles of my feet. But unless the saturasolution coming up from the IV grid found living roots, the whole thing would be a waste.
Carl looked grave as he put the sprayer back into the truck. “If it’s not looking better by Wednesday, call me,” he said to the Barbers. “You have my home phone number. We’ll stop by on Friday to adjust the IV solution, and I’ll check it then.”
“How much is this—going to cost?” Mr. Barber whispered, so his wife and the neighbors couldn’t hear. Carl gave him a mournful, disapproving look, and Mr. Barber turned away, ashamed.
“Hell, I understand where he’s coming from, though,” Carl told me when we were back on the road. “It used to be that when you bought a lawn you could get insurance, especially with a new house, but these days nobody is insured. You can insure a tree, a potted one, anyway, or a cybershrub, and of course any kind of holo. But a living lawn? Jesus, Gail, no wonder the guy’s worried.”
Carl’s empathy is his best quality.
* * *
We stopped for lunch at Lord Byron’s on the Princeton bypass; it’s the only place that’ll allow a girl with no shoes. Lord Byron was a cook at a veterans’ hospital for twenty years before he saved enough to start his own place. Because of this medical background, he thinks he’s a doctor.
“The usual,” said Carl. Two beers and a sloppy joe on a hard roll.
Lord Byron lifted my cap and his huge warm black hand covered the top of my head. “Just as I thought,” he said. “Cold as ice. Sure you can’t find something on the menu you can eat, Gay?”
He never could say my name right either.
* * *
After lunch we changed the motherboard on a flower bed at a funeral home on Route 303. The display was one of those cheap, sixteen-bit jobs that you can’t walk through, that only looks right from a hundred yards or so. Carl had sold it to them last fall. It was supposedly upgradeable, but in fact the company that made it had gone out of business over the winter, and now the chip was an orphan; you couldn’t change the variety or even the colors of the flowers without a whole new unit.
Carl explained this hesitantly, expecting an argument, but the funeral home manager signed for the new chip, a Hallmark clone, in a minute. “It’s one of these franchise operations, Gail,” Carl said on the way back to the shop. “They don’t care what they spend. Hell, why should they? It’s all tax deductible under the Environmental Upgrade Act. I never liked flowers much anyway. Even organic ones.”
* * *
Tuesday was a better day because we got to dig. We put in ten meters of Patagonian Civet Hedge at Johnson, Johnson, & Johnson. Pat is not really Patagonian; the name is supposed to suggest some kind of hardy stock. It’s actually cyberhedge, a fert-saturated plastate lattice with dri-gro bud lodgements at 20 mm intervals on a 3-D grid. But the tiny leaves that grow out of it are as real as I am. They bask in the sun and wave in the wind. The bugs, if there were any, would be fooled.
Carl was in a good mood. Ten meters of pat at $325 a meter is a nice piece of change. And since the roots themselves are not alive, you can put them directly into untreated ground. There’s something about the sliding of a shovel into the dirt that stirs the blood of a nurseryman.
“This is the life, right, Gail?” Carl said.
I nodded and grinned back at him. Even though something about the dirt didn’t smell right. It didn’t smell wrong. It just didn’t smell at all.
* * *
After lunch at Lord Byron’s, Carl sold two electric trees at the Garden State Mall. The manager wanted the trees for a display at the main entrance, and Carl had to talk him out of organics. Carl doesn’t like the electrics any better than I do, but sometimes they are the only alternative.
“I sort of wanted real trees,” the manager said.
“Not outdoors you don’t,” Carl said. “Look, organic trees are too frail. Even if you could afford them—and you can’t—they get weird diseases, they fall over. You’ve got to feed them day and night. Let me show you these new Dutch Elms from Microsoft.” He threw the switch on the holoprojector while I started piecing together the sensofence. “See how great they look?” Carl said. “Go ahead, walk all the way around them. We call them The Immortals. Bugs don’t eat on them, they never get sick, and all you have to feed them is 110. We can set this projector up on the roof, so you don’t have to worry about cars running over it.”
“I sort of wanted something that cast a shadow,” the manager said.
“You don’t want shadows here at the mall anyway,” said Carl, who had an answer for everything when he was selling. “And you won’t have to worry about shoppers walking through the trees”—he passed his hand through the trunk—“and spoiling the image, either. That’s what this fence is for, which my lovely assistant is setting up. Ready, Gail?”
I set two sections of white picket fence next to the tree and snapped them together.
“That’s not a holo,” said the manager.
“No sir. Solid plastic,” Carl said. “And it does a lot more than just keep people from walking or driving though the trees. The pickets themselves are sophisticated envirosensors. Made in Singapore. Watch.”
I turned on the fence, and since there was no wind, Carl blew on a picket. The leaves on the trees waved and wiggled. He covered a picket with his hand and a shadow fell over the treetops. “They respond to actual wind and sun conditions, for the utmost in total realism. Now let’s suppose it looks like rain . . .”
That was my cue. I handed Carl a paper cup and he sprinkled water on the pickets with his fingertips, like a priest giving a blessing. The leaves of the trees shimmered and looked wet. “We call them the Immortals,” Carl said again, proudly.
“What about birds?”
“Birds?”
“I read somewhere that birds get confused and try to land in the branches or something,” the manager said. “I forget exactly.”
Carl’s laugh was suddenly sad. “How long since you’ve seen a bird?”
* * *
Wednesday was the day we had set aside to service Carl’s masterpiece, the Oak Grove at Princeton University. These were not ailanth-oaks or composite red “woods”; these were full-sized white oaks of solid wood that grew, not out of pots, but straight out of the “ground”—a .09-acre ecotrap colloid reservoir saturated with a high electrolyte forced-drip solution of Arborpryzinamine Plus, the most effective (and expensive) IV arbo-stabilizer ever developed. The ground colloid was so firm that the trees stood without cables, fully forty-four feet tall. They were grand. The Grove was seven oaks in all, only two less than the state forest in Windham. Princeton was the only private institution in New Jersey that could afford so many organic trees.
But something was wrong. There wasn’t a leaf on any of them.
“Code Seven, Gail,” said Carl with an undertone of panic in his voice. I limped up the hill as fast as I could and checked the vats under the Humanities Building, but they were almost full and the solution was correct, so I left them. Trees aren’t like grass; there was no point in cranking up the IV pump pressure.
Carl was honking the horn, so I got back in the truck and we left to look for the Dean of Grounds. He wasn’t in his office. We found him at Knowledge Hall, watching an outfit from Bucks County do a scan-in on the north wall ivy. The ivy wasn’t quite dead yet; I could hear its faint brown moaning as the software scanned and replicated each dying tendril, replacing it with a vivid green image. Then the old stuff was pulled down with a long wall rake and bagged. I was getting a headache.
“I just came from the Grove,” Carl demanded. “How long have the oaks been bare like that? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I figured they were automatic,” said the Grounds Dean. “Besides, nobody’s blaming you.”
The image-ivy came complete with butterflies, hovering tirelessly.
“It’s not a question of blame,” said Carl. Exasperated with the Grounds Dean, he put the pickup into gear. “Jump in, Gail,” he said. “Let’s head back to the Grove. I think we’ve got a Code Seven here. It’s time for the Thumper.”
The Thumper is a gasoline-powered induction coil the size of the “salamander” we used to warm the greenhouse back when the winters were cold. While Carl cranked it up, I pulled the two cables attached to it out of the truck bed and started dragging them toward the trees; they grew heavier as they grew longer.
“We haven’t got all day!” Carl yelled. I clipped the red cable to a low branch on the farthest tree, and clipped the black one to a steel rod driven into the ground-colloid. Then I got back in the truck.
The Grounds Dean pulled up on his three-wheeler just as Carl hit the switch. A few students hurrying to class stopped and looked around, bewildered, as the current ripped through the pavement under them. Carl hit it twice more. I could see the topmost twigs of the trees flutter, but there was no feeling there, and hardly any far below where the taproots were curled in on themselves in dark and silent misery.
“That oughta wake ’em up!” the Grounds Dean called out cheerily.
Carl ignored him. He was in the Grove, kneeling at the base of one of the oaks, and he motioned for me to come over. “Volunteer,” he whispered, brushing four tiny blades of fescue with his fingertips. “I haven’t seen that in years.” I felt it with my fingertips, an incredibly delicate green filigree, eagerly and shamelessly alive. It was feeding on the nutrients that should have gone to the tree roots, which had somehow lost their will to live.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you, Gail,” Carl said, brushing his knees off as we stood up; awkwardly, he leaned over and brushed mine off too. “I don’t know what’s getting into me.” And it was true: It was the first time he had yelled at me since I had sought refuge in his nursery six springs before.
Carl told the Grounds Dean that we would check on the Oak Grove tomorrow, and we left. But we both knew the electroshock was too little, too late. On the way back to the nursery, Carl didn’t talk about his beloved oaks at all. Instead, he talked about the volunteer. “Remember when grass just grew, Gail?” he said. “It was everywhere. You didn’t have to feed it, or force it, or plant it, or anything. Kids made money cutting it. Hell, you couldn’t stop it! It grew on the roadsides, grew in the medians, grew up through the cracks in the sidewalk. Trees, too. Trees grew wild. Leave a field alone and it turned into a forest in a few years. Life was in the air, like wild yeast; the whole damn world was like sourdough bread. Remember, Gail? Those were the good old days.”
I nodded and looked away, but not before tears of self-pity sprang unbidden to my eyes. How could I forget the good old days?
* * *
By noon on Wednesday the Barbers hadn’t called, so we swung by their place on the way to lunch. The ominous brown edge was still there, but the grass toward the center of the lawn was a brighter green, almost feverish-looking in spots. “At least it’s still alive,” Carl said, but a little uncertainly. I shrugged. I didn’t feel good.
“That girl doesn’t look right to me,” said Lord Byron at lunch. I had to find a chair because I couldn’t balance on a counter stool.
“She’ll be all right,” said Carl. Next to empathy, optimism is his best quality. “And I’ll have the usual.”
Carl spent the afternoon doing the books while I dozed on a cot at the office end of the greenhouse. “What I lose in plants I make up in cybers,” he said. “I’m the only nurseryman in the state who still services organics—but you know that. Funny how it all balances out, Gail. First I make money poisoning or cutting the grass; then I make more trying to keep it alive. When that goes, there’s a fortune in greenlawn. Paint it every spring. Same with trees. First it was sales. Then it was maintenance, life supports. Now it’s electrics. Hell, I don’t know what I’m complaining about, Gail. I’m making more money than ever, yet somehow I can’t help feeling like I’m going out of business . . .”
