Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

by Terry Bisson

  I knew that Here’s Johnny couldn’t tell me what was going on, at least until I had been sworn in, so on the way back East we just shot the bull and caught up on old times. We hadn’t been friends in the Service—there was age and rank and temperament between us—but time has a way of smoothing out those wrinkles. Most of my old friends were dead; most of his were in civilian life, working for one of the French and Indian firms that serviced the network of communications and weather satellites that were the legacy of the last century’s space programs. The Service Here’s Johnny and I knew had been cut down to a Coast Guard-type outfit running an orbital rescue shuttle and maintaining the lunar asteroid-watch base I had helped build, Houbolt.

  “I was lucky enough to draw Houbolt,” Here’s Johnny said, “or I would probably have retired myself three years ago, at fifty.”

  I winced. Even the kids were getting old.

  * * *

  We took a cab straight through the Lincoln/Midtown Tunnel to the UN building in Queens, where I was recommissioned as a major in the Space Service by a bored lady in a magenta uniform. My new papers specified that when I retired again in sixty days I would draw a major’s pension plus augmented medical with a full dental plan.

  This was handsome treatment indeed, since I still had several teeth left. I was impressed; and also puzzled. “Okay, Here’s Johnny,” I said as we walked out into the perfect October sunlight (at my age you notice fall more than spring): “Let’s have it. What’s the deal? What’s going on?”

  He handed me a room chit for a midtown hotel (the Service had never been able to afford Queens) and a ticket on the first flight out for Reykjavik the next morning; but he held on to a brown envelope with my name scrawled on it.

  “I have your orders in this envelope,” he said. “They explain everything. The problem is, well—once I give them to you I’m supposed to stay by your side until I put you on the plane tomorrow morning.”

  “And you have a girlfriend.”

  “I figured you might.”

  So I did. An old girlfriend. At my age, all your girlfriends are old.

  * * *

  New York is supposed to be one of the dirtiest cities in the world; it is certainly the noisiest. Luckily I like noise and, like most old people, need little sleep. Here’s Johnny must have needed more; he was late. He met me at the Icelandic gate at Reagan International only minutes before my flight’s last boarding call and handed me the brown envelope with my name on it.

  “You’re not supposed to open it until you’re on the plane, Captain,” he said. “I mean, Major.”

  “Not so fast,” I said, grabbing his wrist. “You got me into this. You must know something about it.”

  Here’s Johnny lowered his voice and looked from side to side; like most lunies he loved secrets. “You know Zippe-Buisson, the French firm that cleans up orbital trash?” he said. “A few months ago they noticed a new blip in medium high earth. There weren’t any lost sats on the db; it was too big to be a dropped wrench and too small to be a shuttle tank.”

  Ding, went the door. I backed into the gate and held it open with one foot. “Go on,” I said.

  “Remember Voyager, the interstellar probe sent out in the 1970s? It carried a disk with digital maps of earth and pictures of humans, even music. Mozart and what’s-his-name—”

  Ding ding, went the door. “I remember the joke. ‘Send more Chuck Berry,’ ” I said. “But you’re changing the subject.”

  No, he wasn’t. Just as the door started to close and I had to jump through, Here’s Johnny called out: “Voyager is back. With a passenger.”

  * * *

  The sealed orders, which I opened on the plane, didn’t add much to what Here’s Johnny had told me. I was officially assigned to the UN’s SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Commission, E Team, temporarily stationed at Houbolt, Luna. That was interesting, since Houbolt had been cut back to robot operation before my retirement, and hadn’t housed anybody (that I knew of) for almost fifteen years.

  I was to proceed to Reykjavik for my meds; I was to communicate with no one about my destination or my assignment. Period. There was no indication what the E Team was (although I had, of course, been given a clue), or what my role in it was to be. Or why I had been chosen.

  Reykjavik is supposed to be one of the cleanest cities in the world. It is certainly one of the quietest. I spent the afternoon and most of the evening getting medical tests in a sparkling new hospital wing, where it seemed I was the only patient. The doctors seemed less worried about my physical condition than my brain, blood, and bone status. I’m no medical expert, but I can recognize a cancer scan when I am subjected to one.

  In between tests I met my new boss, the head of SETI’s E Team, by videophone from Luna. She was a heavyset fifty-ish woman with perfect teeth (now that I had my dental plan, I was noticing teeth again), short blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a barely perceptible Scandinavian accent. She introduced herself as Dr. Sunda Hvarlgen and said: “Welcome to Reykjavik, Major. I understand you are part of Houbolt’s history. I hope they are treating you well in my hometown.”

  “The films in the waiting room aren’t bad,” I said. “I watched E.T. twice.”

  “I promise an official briefing when you get to Houbolt. I just wanted to welcome you to the E Team.”

  “Does this mean I passed my medicals?”

  She rang off impatiently and it struck me as I hung up that the whole purpose of the call had been to get a look at me.

  They finished with me at nine P.M. The next morning at seven, I was loaded into a fat-tired van and taken twelve miles north on a paved highway, then east on a track across a lava field. I was the only passenger. The driver was a descendant (or so he said) of Huggard the Grasping, one of the original lost settlers of Newfoundland. After an hour we passed through the gates of an abandoned air base. Huggard pointed to a small lava ridge with sharp peaks like teeth; behind it I noticed a single silver tooth, even sharper than the rest. It was the nose cone of an Ariane-Daewoo IV.

  * * *

  The Commission had given up the advantages of an equatorial launch in order to preserve the secrecy of the project; this meant that the burn was almost twenty-eight minutes long. I didn’t mind. I hadn’t been off planet in eleven years, and the press of six gravities was like an old lover holding me in her arms again. And the curve of the planet below—well, if I had been a sentimental man, I would have cried. But sentiment is for middle age, just as romance is for youth. Old age, like war, has colder feelings; it is, after all, a struggle to the death.

  High Orbital was lighted and looked bustling from approach, which surprised me; the station had been shut down years ago except for fueling and docking use. We didn’t go inside; just used the universal airlock for transfer to the lunar shuttle, the dirty but reliable old Diana in which I had made so many trips. She was officially Here’s Johnny’s command, but he was on rotation: presumably his reward for bringing me in alive.

  When we old folks forget how decrepit and uninteresting we are, we can count on the young to remind us by ignoring us. The three-person crew of the Diana kept to themselves and spoke only Russo-Japanese. It made for a lonely day and a half, but I didn’t mind. The trip to the Moon is one of the loveliest there is. You’re leaving one ball of water and heading for another of rock, and there’s always a view.

  Since the crew didn’t know I speak (or at least understand) a little R-J, I got my first clue as to what my assignment might be. I overheard two of them speculating about “ET” (a name that is the same in every language) and one said: “Who would have thought the thing would only relate to old folks?”

  That night I slept like a baby. I woke up only once, when we crossed over what we lunies used to call Wolf Creek Pass—the top of the Earth’s (relatively) long, steep gravitational well, and the beginning of the short, shallow slope to the Moon. In zero g there’s no way this transition can be felt: Yet I awoke, knowing exactly (even after eleven yea
rs) where I was.

  I was on my way back to the Moon.

  * * *

  Situated on the farside of the Moon, facing always away from the Earth, Houbolt lies open to the Universe. In a more imaginative, more intelligent, more spirited age it would be a deep-space optical observatory; or at least a monastery. In our petty, penny-pinching, paranoid century it is used only as a semiautomated Near-Earth-Object, or asteroid, early-warning station. It wouldn’t have been kept open at all if it were not for the near-miss of NEO 2201 Oljato back in ’14, which had pried loose UN funds as only stark terror will.

  Houbolt lies near the center of the farside’s great Korolev crater, on a gray regolith plain ringed by jagged mountains unsmoothed by water, wind, or ice; as sheer as the lava sills of Iceland but miles instead of meters high; fantastic enough to remind you over and over, with every glance, that they are made of Moon, not Earth; and that you are in their realm; and that it is not a realm of living things.

  I loved it. I had helped build and then maintain the base for four years, so I knew it well. In fact, on seeing that barren landscape again, in which life is neither a promise nor a memory, not even a rumor, I realized why I had stayed in the desert after retirement and not gone back to Tennessee, even though I still had people there. Tennessee is too damn green.

  Houbolt is laid out like a starfish, with five small peripheral domes (named for the four winds, plus Other) all connected by forty-meter tubes to the larger central dome known as Grand Central. Hvarlgen met me at the airlock in South, which was still the shop and maintenance dome. I felt at home right away.

  I was a little surprised to see that she was in a wheelchair; other than that, she looked the same as on the screen. The blue eyes were even bluer here on the blueless Moon.

  “Welcome to Houbolt,” she said as we shook hands. “Or back, maybe I should say. Didn’t South here used to be your office?” The Moon with its .16g has always drawn more than its share of ’capped, and I could tell by the way she spun the chair around and ran it tilted back on two wheels that it was just right for her. I followed her down the tube toward Grand Central.

  I had been afraid Houbolt might have fallen into ruin, like High Orbital, but it was newly painted and the air smelled fresh. Grand Central was bright and cheerful. Hvarlgen’s team of lunies had put in a few spots of color, but they hadn’t overdone it. All of them were young, in bright yellow tunics. When Hvarlgen introduced me as one of the pioneers of Houbolt, none of them blinked at my name, even though it was one of twenty-two on a plaque just inside the main airlock. I wasn’t surprised. The Service is like a mold, an organism with immortality but no memory.

  A young lunie showed me to my windowless pie-shaped “wedgie” in North. A loose orange tunic with a SETI patch lay folded on the hammock. But I wasn’t about to put on Hvarlgen’s uniform until I learned what she was doing.

  I found her back in Grand Central waiting by the coffee machine, a giant Russian apparatus that reflected our faces like a funhouse mirror. I was surprised to see myself. When you get to a certain age you stop looking in mirrors.

  A hand-drawn poster over the machine read D=118.

  “Hours until the Diana returns,” Hvarlgen said. “The lunies see this as a hardship assignment, surprisingly enough. They’re only used to being here a day or two at a time.”

  “You promised a briefing,” I said.

  “I did.” She drew me a coffee and pointed out a seat. “I assume, since gossip is still the fuel of the Service, that in spite of our best efforts you have managed to learn something about our project here.” She scowled. “If you haven’t, you’d be too dumb to work with.”

  “There was a rumor,” I said. “About an ET.”

  “An AO,” she corrected. “At this point it’s classified only as an Anomalous Object. Even though it’s not in fact an object. More like an idea for an object. If my work—our work—is successful and we make contact, it will be upgraded to an ET. It was found in earth orbit some sixteen days ago.”

  I was impressed. Here’s Johnny hadn’t told me how quickly all this had been pulled together. “You all move fast,” I said.

  She nodded. “What else did you hear?”

  “Voyager,” I said. “ ‘Send more Chuck Berry.’ ”

  “Voyager II, actually. Circa 1977. Which left the heliosphere in 1991, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space. Last month, more than fifty years after its launch, it was found in high Earth orbit with its batteries discharged, its nuclears dead, seemingly derelict. Space junk. How long it had been there, who or what returned it, and why—we still don’t know. As it was brought into lock aboard the recovery vessel, the Jean Genet, what had appeared to be a shadow attached itself to one of the crew, one Hector Mersault, apparently while they were unsuiting. They didn’t notice at first, until they found Mersault sitting in the airlock, half undressed and dazed, as if he had just come out from under anesthesia. He was holding his helmet and the shadow was pooled in it; apparently our AO likes small spaces, like a cat.”

  “Likes?”

  “We allow ourselves certain anthropomorphisms, Major. We will correct for them later. If necessary. More coffee?”

  While she poured us both another cup, I looked around the room; but with lunies it’s hard to tell European from Asian, male from female.

  “So where’s this Mersault?” I asked. “Is he here?”

  “Not exactly,” Hvarlgen said. “He walked out of an airlock the next morning. But our friend the AO is still with us. Come. I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  We drained our coffee and I followed Hvarlgen down the tube toward the periphery dome known as Other. She ran with her chair tilted back, so that her front wheels were almost a foot off the floor; I was to learn that this angle of elevation reflected her mood. Other was divided into two semi-hemi-spherical rooms used to grow the environmental we used to call “weed & bean.” There was a small storage shed between the two rooms. We headed straight for the shed. A lunie with a ceremonial (I hoped) wiregun unlocked the door and let us into a gray closed wedgie, small as a prison cell. The door closed behind us. The room was empty except for a plastic chair facing a waist-high shelf, on which sat a clear glass bowl, like a fishbowl, in which was—

  Well, a shadow.

  It was about the size of a keyboard or a cantaloupe. It was hard to look at; it was sort of there and sort of not there. When I looked to one side, the bowl looked empty; whatever was (or wasn’t) in it, didn’t register on my peripheral vision.

  “Our bio teams have been over it,” Hvarlgen said. “It does not register on any instruments. It can’t be touched, weighed, or measured in any way, not even an electrical charge. It’s not even not there. As far as I can guess, it’s some kind of antiparticle soup. Don’t ask me how our eyes can see it. I think they just see the isn’t of it, if you know what I mean.”

  I nodded even though I didn’t.

  “It doesn’t show up on video; but I am hoping it will register on analog.”

  “Analog?”

  “Chemical. We’re filming it.” Hvarlgen pointed to a gun-like object jerry-rigged to one wall, which whirred and followed her hand, then aimed back at the bowl. “I had this antique shipped up especially for the job. Everything our AO does is captured on film, twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Film!” I said. I was impressed again. “So what exactly does it do?”

  “Sits there in the bowl. That’s the problem. It refuses to—but is ‘refuse’ too anthropomorphic a word for you? Let me start over. As far as we can tell, it will only interact with living tissue.”

  A shiver went through me. Living tissue? That was me, for a few more years anyway, and I was beginning to understand, or at least suspect, why I was here. But why me? “What exactly do you mean by ‘interact’?” I asked.

  Hvarlgen scowled. “Don’t look so worried,” she said. “In spite of what happened to Mersault, this is no suicide assignment. Let’s go get ano
ther cup of coffee, and I’ll explain.”

  * * *

  We left the AO to its bowl, and the lunie with the wiregun to lock up. Back at Grand Central, Hvarlgen poured two more cups of thick, lunar coffee. I was beginning to see her as a wheeled device that ran on the stuff.

  “SETI was set up in the middle of the last century,” she said. “In a sense, Voyager was part of the program. NASA took it over toward the end of the century and changed the name, but the idea was the same. They were searching for evidence of intelligent life, the assumption being that actual communication over such vast distances would be impossible. Contact was considered even more remote. But in the event that it did occur, it was assumed that it probably would not be a ‘take me to your leader’ sort of thing, a spaceship landing in London or Peking; that it would be more complicated than that, and that plenty of room for human sensitivity and intuition should be built into the system. Some flexibility. So SETI’s directors set up the E (for ‘Elliot’) Team, which would swing into operation on first contact and operate, for twenty-one days only, in strictest secrecy. No press, no politics. No grown-ups, if you will. It would be run by a single person instead of a committee; a humanist rather than a scientist.”

  “A woman rather than a man?”

  “That’s just been the luck of the draw. You’ll be surprised to learn how it has backfired in this case.” Hvarlgen scowled again. “Anyway, by the time I got the job, the E Team was more of a sop thrown to the soft sciences than a working position—a brief orientation, a stipend, and a beeper that was never expected to beep. But the mechanisms were still in place. I was visiting psychology professor at UC Davis, on leave from Reykjavik U, when I got the call—within hours of the Jean Genet incident. I was already on my way up to High Orbital when Mersault died. Or killed himself.”

  “Or was killed,” I offered.

  “Whatever. We’ll get into that later. At any rate, I exercised the extraordinary authority which the UN had granted the E Team—figuring it would never be used, I’m sure—and had this whole operation set up here at Houbolt.”