Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

by Terry Bisson

  “Every spring it gets worse,” Carl muttered as he bounced across the last fairway, through the ditch, and onto the county road. “Are you okay? Do you want me to pull over?”

  I tried to throw up but nothing would come.

  * * *

  Friday I could barely get up. My once dark skin looked pale reflected in the windows of the greenhouse. Carl was tapping on the glass with the truck key. It was already ten o’clock.

  “Code Eight, Gail!” he said. “I’m getting the truck.”

  It was the Barbers. “I couldn’t understand what she was saying,” Carl said as he pulled out into traffic. He gave me the emergency flasher to plug in and set up on the dash. “But it must be bad. Hell, she was screaming.”

  It was a bright, hard, spring day; the sky was cruel blue. Route One was jammed and Carl turned on the siren as well as the light. He drove on the shoulder, with one wheel on the asphalt and the other on the green-painted rocks.

  By the time we got to Whispering Woods I could see it was already too late.

  The neighbors were standing around the edges of the Barbers’ front yard, watching the grass turn yellow, then yellow-green, then yellow again, flickering like an alcohol fire in sickening waves. There was a faint crackling noise and a thin dying smell.

  “Sounds like cereal when you pour the milk on!” said one of the kids.

  Carl knelt down and pulled up a clump of grass and smelled the roots; then he sniffed the air and looked over at me as if for the first time. “Code Ten,” he said in a curiously flat voice. Hadn’t we both known this day had to come?

  * * *

  “Look out!” one of the neighbors shouted. “Get back!”

  The brown at the edges of the yard was starting to darken and spread inward. The crackling grew louder as it closed on the still-green center; it pulled back once, then again, each wave leaving the yellow-green grass a little paler. Then the grass all darkened at once like an eye closing, and there was silence. I felt my knees give out, so I leaned back against the truck.

  “It’s not too late, is it, Carl?” asked Mr. Barber, coming to the end of the walk. His wife followed him, sniffling with fear, keeping her feet on the center of the walk, away from the dead ground. The thin dying smell had given way to a foul, wet, loathsome ugly stench as if some great grave had yawned open.

  “What’s that smell?” a neighbor asked.

  “Hey, mister, your boy is falling over,” said one of the kids, tugging at Carl’s sleeve. “His hat came off.”

  “She’s not a boy,” said Carl. “And her name is Gaea.”

  I’d never heard him get it right before.

  “What’s that smell?” asked another neighbor. She was sniffing not the lawn but the wind, the long one, the one that blows all the way around the world.

  “Excuse me,” Carl said to the Barbers. He ran over and tried to pick me up, but I was too far gone.

  “It is too late, isn’t it, Carl?” said Mr. Barber, and Carl, nodding, began to cry, and so would I if I could have anymore.

  The Message

  THE VOICE ON THE PHONE was distinct if faint: “Our call came through.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Although I had wanted this for years, had anticipated it, had worked for it and dreamed of it even when working for other things, it was still hard to believe. And harder still to explain to Janet.

  “That was Beth on the phone,” I said.

  “And you’re leaving.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “We both knew this might happen.”

  “Don’t bother coming back.”

  “Janet . . .”

  But she had already rolled over and was pretending to be asleep. I could almost hear the fabric ripping: the seam of an eight-year marriage that had held us together from small colleges in the Midwest to oceanic exploration centers, to the long winters at Woods Hole.

  Once it started to tear, it tore straight and true. I took a cab to the airport.

  The flight to San Diego was interminable. As soon as I got off the plane I called Doug at Flying Fish.

  “Remember when you said you would drop everything to take me to the island if what we were trying to do came through?”

  “I’ll meet you at the hangar,” he said.

  Doug’s ancient Cessna was already warming up when I got there. I carried two coffees, the black one for him. We were in the air and heading west over Point Loma before we spoke.

  “So the fish finally got through,” he said.

  “Dolphins aren’t fish and you know it,” I said.

  “I wasn’t talking about them; I was talking about Leonard. He spends so much time underwater he ought to grow gills.”

  Doug flew out to the island twice a month to deliver supplies to my partners. As the mainland diminished to a smudge behind us, I thought of the years of research that had brought us to this remote Pacific outpost.

  Our funding had been cut off by the Navy when we had refused to allow them to use our data for weapons research. It had been cut off by Stanford when we had refused to publish our preliminary results. Grant after grant had fallen away like leaves; like my marriage, which I now could see was only another leaf hitting the ground. Janet and I had been going in different directions for several years, ever since I had turned down tenure in order to continue my life’s work.

  The Project.

  “There it is, Doc.”

  The island had been loaned to us by Alejandro Martinez, the nitrate millionaire who was even now on his deathbed in Mexico City. It was a mile-long teardrop of rock, inhabited at one end by seals and at the other by the gray (dolphin-colored, I realized for the first time) fiberglass modulars of the Project.

  Doug brought the little 172 straight in to the short strip bulldozed out of the side of a hill. I wondered how he managed in a fog or a wind. There were only about ten feet left at the end, when he snubbed the brakes hard to keep the prop out of the rocks.

  Beth was waiting in the jeep with the engine running. Seeing the radiant smile on her broad, plain face, I wondered what my life would have been like if I had married not for beauty but for harmony. She and Leonard were partners before anything else.

  “Welcome!” she shouted over the wind and crashing surf. “Want to join us, Doug? This is our big day!”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said, shutting down the engine. “Where’s the fish?”

  “Down in the pool, I imagine,” Beth said. “Comes and goes. What kind of intelligent creature would communicate with us if we kept it confined?”

  “He’s pulling your leg,” I told her. “He’s talking about Leonard.”

  “So am I,” she laughed.

  Expertly, terrifyingly (“This is Mexico, after all!”) Beth raced down the island’s only half mile of road to the lab, which was built out over the rocks. It looked like a gray and pink coral shelf left behind by the tide. The pool it enclosed was open on three sides to the sea.

  Leonard was on the sheltered upper deck, dripping in the wet suit he always wore, munching a seaweed sandwich and staring at a computer screen.

  “It came?” I asked.

  “The message. It came,” he said, looking up at me, his face shining with either seawater or tears.

  We embraced, and Beth joined us both. It was a shared triumph. Leonard and I had started The Project twelve years before. He had done the undersea field work, she had designed and built the voice synthesizer, and I had written the program.

  While I got into my wet suit, Beth explained to a puzzled Doug what we had done. It had all been top secret until now. “The previous attempts to communicate with dolphins always failed because of the time factor,” she said. “It was Doc who figured out that they think not as individuals but collectively. The first problem was to convince them that we, a race that lives and dies as individuals, is even capable of thought, much less communication. Their feeling was, I think, that all our activity was reactive behavior.”

&
nbsp; “What about cities? Ships?” said Doug. “We’ve been active on the sea for centuries.”

  “Oh, they know that. But they have seen coral reefs and seashells, all built objects. The Australian Barrier Reef, for example, is a made object, and it’s vaster than all our cities put together. They don’t make things. They don’t put value in things.”

  “The work of their civilization is thought,” put in Leonard. “They are building a thought, a concept that they have been working out over the millennia. It’s a grand project beyond anything we could imagine.”

  “So they think they’re too good to talk to us,” said Doug.

  “Don’t get your fur up,” said Beth, laughing. “They don’t think in words, like we do. Words are an extension of the hand—a grasping mechanism, and they don’t grasp and manipulate ideas in the way we do. So what we’ve been working to do over the years is to try and break their concepts down into words.”

  I was almost ready. I had another gulp of coffee. My hand was shaking.

  “The main problem was the time frame,” Leonard said. “We talk in bites. Their conversations run in long, centuries-old strings. They are not interested in communicating individual to individual. They communicate with their own developing selves and their descendants. Ready?”

  This last was to me. I nodded.

  Leonard led me down the stairs to the pool level. Beth and Doug followed. The surf outside was booming like a great heart.

  “It still sounds like what you’re saying is that they don’t want to talk to us,” Doug protested.

  “Oh, they do, as it turns out,” Leonard said. “They were very glad to hear from us. You see, they know who we are.”

  “They remember,” said Beth.

  “They have a message for us,” said Leonard.

  “It took thirty-one months for them to say it,” said Beth. “It was the work of thousands of individuals.”

  “So let’s have it!” said Doug. We all laughed at his impatience, so typically human.

  “Doc first,” said Leonard. “The synthesizer only works under the water.” He led me to the end of the pool, where several dolphins, dignified and pearl-gray, waited like envoys in the reception room of an embassy.

  I slipped into the water. It was cold but it felt good. The dolphins nuzzled at me, then dove. I felt like diving with them, but I had only my wet suit and no breathing gear.

  “Ready?” Leonard asked.

  I nodded.

  “Put your head under, and listen.”

  I floated. A deep, slow voice echoed through my bones, like the voice I remembered from a long-ago dream:

  “Come home. All is forgiven.”

  England Underway

  MR. FOX WAS, he realized afterward, with a shudder of sudden recognition like that of the man who gives a cup of water to a stranger and finds out hours, or even years later, that it was Napoleon, perhaps the first to notice. Perhaps. At least no one else in Brighton seemed to be looking at the sea that day. He was taking his constitutional on the Boardwalk, thinking of Lizzie Eustace and her diamonds, the people in novels becoming increasingly more real to him as the people in the everyday (or “real”) world grew more remote, when he noticed that the waves seemed funny.

  “Look,” he said to Anthony, who accompanied him everywhere, which was not far, his customary world being circumscribed by the Boardwalk to the south, Mrs. Oldenshield’s to the east, the cricket grounds to the north, and the Pig & Thistle, where he kept a room—or more precisely, a room kept him, and had since 1956—to the west.

  “Woof?” said Anthony, in what might have been a quizzical tone.

  “The waves,” said Mr. Fox. “They seem—well, odd, don’t they? Closer together?”

  “Woof.”

  “Well, perhaps not. Could be just my imagination.”

  Fact is, waves had always looked odd to Mr. Fox. Odd and tiresome and sinister. He enjoyed the Boardwalk but he never walked on the beach proper, not only because he disliked the shifty quality of the sand but because of the waves with their ceaseless back-and-forth. He didn’t understand why the sea had to toss about so. Rivers didn’t make all that fuss, and they were actually going somewhere. The movement of the waves seemed to suggest that something was stirring things up, just beyond the horizon. Which was what Mr. Fox had always suspected in his heart; which was why he had never visited his sister in America.

  “Perhaps the waves have always looked funny and I have just never noticed,” said Mr. Fox. If indeed “funny” was the word for something so odd.

  At any rate, it was almost half past four. Mr. Fox went to Mrs. Oldenshield’s, and with a pot of tea and a plate of shortbread biscuits placed in front of him, read his daily Trollope—he had long ago decided to read all forty-seven novels in exactly the order, and at about the rate, in which they had been written—then fell asleep for twenty minutes. When he awoke (and no one but he knew he was sleeping) and closed the book, Mrs. Oldenshield put it away for him, on the high shelf where the complete set, bound in morocco, resided in state. Then Mr. Fox walked to the cricket ground, so that Anthony might run with the boys and their kites until dinner was served at the Pig & Thistle. A whiskey at nine with Harrison ended what seemed at the time to be an ordinary day.

  The next day it all began in earnest.

  Mr. Fox awoke to a hubbub of traffic, footsteps, and unintelligible shouts. There was, as usual, no one but himself and Anthony (and of course, the Finn, who cooked) at breakfast; but outside, he found the streets remarkably lively for the time of year. He saw more and more people as he headed downtown, until he was immersed in a virtual sea of humanity. People of all sorts, even Pakistanis and foreigners, not ordinarily much in evidence in Brighton off season.

  “What in the world can it be?” Mr. Fox wondered aloud. “I simply can’t imagine.”

  “Woof,” said Anthony, who couldn’t imagine either, but who was never called upon to do so.

  With Anthony in his arms, Mr. Fox picked his way through the crowd along the King’s Esplanade until he came to the entrance to the Boardwalk. He mounted the twelve steps briskly. It was irritating to have one’s customary way blocked by strangers. The Boardwalk was half filled with strollers who, instead of strolling, were holding onto the rail and looking out to sea. It was mysterious; but then the habits of everyday people had always been mysterious to Mr. Fox; they were so much less likely to stay in character than the people in novels.

  The waves were even closer together than they had been the day before; they were piling up as if pulled toward the shore by a magnet. The surf where it broke had the odd appearance of a single continuous wave about one and a half feet high. Though it no longer seemed to be rising, the water had risen during the night: it covered half the beach, coming almost up to the seawall just below the Boardwalk.

  The wind was quite stout for the season. Off to the left (the east) a dark line was seen on the horizon. It might have been clouds but it looked more solid, like land. Mr. Fox could not remember ever having seen it before, even though he had walked here daily for the past forty-two years.

  “Dog?”

  Mr. Fox looked to his left. Standing beside him at the rail of the Boardwalk was a large, one might even say portly, African man with an alarming hairdo. He was wearing a tweed coat. An English girl clinging to his arm had asked the question. She was pale with dark, stringy hair, and she wore an oilskin cape that looked wet even though it wasn’t raining.

  “Beg your pardon?” said Mr. Fox.

  “That’s a dog?” The girl was pointing toward Anthony.

  “Woof.”

  “Well, of course it’s a dog.”

  “Can’t he walk?”

  “Of course he can walk. He just doesn’t always choose to.”

  “You bloody wish,” said the girl, snorting unattractively and looking away. She wasn’t exactly a girl. She could have been twenty.

  “Don’t mind her,” said the African. “Look at that chop, would you.”

>   “Indeed,” Mr. Fox said. He didn’t know what to make of the girl but he was grateful to the African for starting a conversation. It was often difficult these days; it had become increasingly difficult over the years. “A storm offshore, perhaps?” he ventured.

  “A storm?” the African said. “I guess you haven’t heard. It was on the telly hours ago. We’re making close to two knots now, south and east. Heading around Ireland and out to sea.”

  “Out to sea?” Mr. Fox looked over his shoulder at the King’s Esplanade and the buildings beyond, which seemed as stationary as ever. “Brighton is heading out to sea?”

  “You bloody wish,” the girl said.

  “Not just Brighton, man,” the African said. For the first time, Mr. Fox could hear a faint Caribbean lilt in his voice. “England herself is underway.”

  England underway? How extraordinary. Mr. Fox could see what he supposed was excitement in the faces of the other strollers on the Boardwalk all that day. The wind smelled somehow saltier as he went to take his tea. He almost told Mrs. Oldenshield the news when she brought him his pot and platter; but the affairs of the day, which had never intruded far into her tearoom, receded entirely when he took down his book and began to read. This was (as it turned out) the very day that Lizzie finally read the letter from Mr. Camperdown, the Eustace family lawyer, which she had carried unopened for three days. As Mr. Fox had expected, it demanded that the diamonds be returned to her late husband’s family. In response, Lizzie bought a strongbox. That evening, England’s peregrinations were all the news on the BBC. The kingdom was heading south into the Atlantic at 1.8 knots, according to the newsmen on the telly over the bar at the Pig & Thistle, where Mr. Fox was accustomed to taking a glass of whiskey with Harrison, the barkeep, before retiring. In the sixteen hours since the phenomenon had first been detected, England had gone some thirty-five miles, beginning a long turn around Ireland that would carry it into the open sea.

  “Ireland is not going?” asked Mr. Fox.

  “Ireland has been independent since 19 and 21,” said Harrison, who often hinted darkly at having relatives with the IRA. “Ireland is hardly about to be chasing England around the seven seas.”