The Last Science Fiction Writer

by Allen Steele

  And that’s how I came to be in The Luncheon of the Boating Party, considered today to be one of the great works of the Impressionist period. Some art books state that the young lady in the middle-background is Alphonsine Fournaise, while others say that she’s an “unidentified woman.” Commissioner Sanchez was furious with me when I returned to the 24th century, and after the Review Board completed its investigation, I was no longer allowed to participate in historical missions for the CRC.

  To be honest, though, it matters little to me. It’s a magnificent piece, and I like to think that I was a better model than Alphonsine. And now I know what it was like to pose for a painting during a summer afternoon in a restaurant near Chatou and, for just a little while, to gaze into the eyes of Renoir.

  —for Elizabeth Steele

  THE TEB HUNTER

  “The trick,” Jimmy Ray says, “is not to look ’em in the eye.”

  The truck hits a pothole just then, jouncing on its worn-out shocks and causing stuff to skitter across the dashboard: shotgun shells, empty chewing tobacco cans, wadded-up parking tickets ignored since last May. A little plastic bear swings back and forth beneath the mirror; Jimmy Ray reaches up to steady it, then glances back to make sure nothing has come loose in the rear bed. Satisfied, he takes a swig from the box of Mountain Dew clasped between his thighs.

  “That’s why I don’t take kids,” he continues. “I mean, it’s just too much for ’em. My boy’s too young for this anyway…next season, maybe, after he gets a gun for Christmas…but a couple’a years ago, I tried taking my nephew. Now Brock’s a good kid, and…hang on…”

  Jimmy Ray twists the wheel hard to the left, swerving to avoid another pothole. A can of Red Man falls off the dashboard into my lap. “Gimme that, willya?” I hand it to him; he pops the lid off with his thumb, gives the contents a quick sniff, then tucks it in his hunting vest. “Like I was saying, Brock’s bagged a couple’a deer with no regrets, but I got him out here and he took one look at ’em, and that was all she wrote. Just wouldn’t shoot, no matter what. Fifteen years old, and here he is, bawlin’ like a baby.” He shakes his head in disgust. “So no kids. This is man’s work, if you know what I mean.”

  The woods are thick along either side of the dirt road, red maples shedding their leaves, tall pines dropping cones across the forest floor. We slow down to pass over a small bridge; the creek below is fogged with early morning mist, its clear waters rushing across smooth granite boulders. Jimmy Ray slurps the last of his Mountain Dew, then tosses the empty box out the window. “God, what a beautiful morning,” he says, glancing up through the sunroof. “Great day to be alive.” Then he winks at me. “Less’n you’re a teb, of course.”

  Another quarter-mile down the road, he pulls over to the side. “’Kay, here we is.” The door rasps on its hinges as Jimmy Ray shoves it open; he grunts softly as he pries his massive belly from behind the wheel and climbs down from the cab. Another few moments to unrack his rifle from the rear window—a Savage .30-.06 bolt-action equipped with a scope—before sauntering over back to the back of the truck. The canopy window sports stickers for the NRA and a country-rock band; he throws open the hatch, then pulls a couple of bright orange hunting vests and the six-pack of Budweiser.

  “Here. You can carry this.” Jimmy Ray hands me the beer. He reaches into his jacket pocket, produces a laminated hunting license on an aluminum chain; briefly removing his dirty cap to reveal the bald spot in the midst of his thick black hair, he pulls the chain around his neck, letting the license dangle across his chest. He removes the chewing tobacco from of his pocket and uncaps it, then pulls out a thick wad away and shoves it into the left side of his face between the cheek and his teeth. He tosses the can into truck, slams the hatch shut “Hokay,” he says, his inflection garbled by the chaw in his mouth, “les’ go huntin’.”

  About fifteen feet into woods, we come upon a narrow trail, leading east toward a hill a couple of miles away. “Got my blind set up that way,” he says quietly. “We may come up on one’a them ’fore that, but it won’ matter much. This is real easy, once y’know how to do it. All y’need is the right bait.”

  We continue down the trail. We’re a long way from the nearest house, but Jimmy Ray is confident that we’ll find tebs out here. “People git sick of havin’ ’em ’round, so they drive out here, set ’em loose in the woods.” He turns his head, hocks brown juice into the undergrowth. “They figger they’ll get by, forage for berries and roots, that sort of thing. Or maybe they think they’ll just up and die once winter kicks in. But they ’dapt to jus’ ’bout any place you put ’em, and they breed like crazy.”

  Another spit. “So ’fore you know it, they’re eatin’ up everythin’ they can find, which don’t leave much for anythin’ else out here. An’ when they’re done with that, they come out of the woods, start raidin’ farm crops, goin’ through people’s garbage…whatever they can find. Hungry lil’ peckers.”

  He shakes his head. “I dunno what people find cute about ’em. You wanna good pet, you go get yourself a dog or a cat. Hell, a fish or a lizard, if that’s your thing. But there’s something jus’ not right ’bout tebs. I mean, if God had meant animals to talk, he would’a…” He thinks about this a moment, dredging the depths of his intellect. “I dunno. Given ’em a dictionary or sum’pin.”

  Jimmy Ray’s not particularly careful about avoiding the dry leaves that have fallen across the trail, even though they crunch loudly beneath the soles of his boots. It’s almost as if he wants the tebs to know he’s coming. “Talked once to an environmentalist from the state wildlife commission,” he says after awhile. “Said that tebs are what you call a weed species…something that gits transported into a diff’rent environment and jus’ takes over. Like, y’know, kudzu or tiger mussels, or those fish…y’know, the snakeheads, the ones that can walk across dry land…that got loose up in Maryland some years ago. Tebs are jus’ the same way. Only diff’rence is that they were bio…bio…whatchamacallit, that word…”

  “Bioengineered.”

  “Thas’it. Bioengineered…so now they’re smarter than the average bear.” He grins at me. “’Member that cartoon show? ‘I’m smarter than the average bear.’ I sure loved that when…”

  Suddenly, he halts, falls silent. I don’t know what he’s seen or heard, but I stop as well. Jimmy Ray scans the forest surrounding us, peering into the sun-dappled shadows. At first, I don’t hear anything. Then, just for a moment, something rustles within the lower limbs of a maple a couple of dozen yards away, and I hear a thin, high-pitched voice:

  “Come out and play…come out and play…”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jimmy Ray murmurs. “I gotcher playtime right here.” He absently caresses his rifle as if he’s stroking a lover, then glances back at me and grins. “C’mon. They know we’re here. No sense in keepin’ ’em waitin’.”

  A few hundred yards later, the trail ends in a small clearing, a meadow bordered on all sides by woods. The morning sun touches the dew upon the autumn wildflowers, making the scene look like a picture from a children’s storybook. And in the middle of the clearing, just where it should be, is a small wooden table with four tiny chairs placed around it. Kindergarten lawn furniture, the kind you’d find at Toys R’ Us, except that the paint is beginning to peel and there are old bloodstains soaked into the boards.

  “Hauled this stuff out here two seasons ago,” Jimmy Ray says, pushing aside the high grass as we walk toward it. “Move it around, of course, and clean it off now and then, but it works like a damn.” He smiles. “Learned it from Field and Stream, but this part is my idea. Wanna gimme that beer?”

  I hand him the six-pack; he rips the tops off the cartons and carefully places them on the table. “Book says you should use honey,” he explains, his voice a near-whisper, “but that’s expensive. Bud works just as well, maybe even better. They can smell the sugar, and the alcohol makes ’em slow. But that’s my little secret, so don’t tell anyone, y’hear?”


  The bait in place, we retreat to a small shack he’s put up on the edge of the clearing. No larger than an outhouse, the blind has a narrow slit for a window. The only decoration is a mildewed girlie poster stapled to the inside wall. Jimmy Ray loads his rifle, inserting four rounds in the magazine and chambering a fifth, then lines up five more sounds on a small shelf beneath the window. “Won’t take long,” he says quietly, propping the rifle stock against the window sill and focusing the scope upon the table. “First one saw us, so now he’s tellin’ his friends. They’ll be here right soon.”

  We wait silently for nearly an hour; Jimmy Ray turns his head now and then to spit into a corner of the blind, but otherwise he keeps his eye on the table. The shed is getting warm and I’m beginning to doze off when Jimmy Ray taps my arm and nods toward the window.

  At first, I don’t see anything. Then the tall grass on the other side of the clearing moves, as if something is passing through it. There’s a soft click as Jimmy Ray disengages the safety, but otherwise he’s perfectly still, waiting patiently for his prey to emerge.

  A few moments later, a small figure crawls into a chair, then hops on the table. The teb is full-grown, nearly three feet tall, its pelt black and soft as velvet. Its large brown eyes cautiously glance back and forth, then it waddles on its short hind legs across the table until it reaches the nearest beer. Leaning over, the teb picks up the carton, sniffs with its short muzzle. Then its mouth breaks into a smile.

  “Honey!” it yelps. “Oh boy, honey!”

  Jimmy Ray steals a moment to wink at me. Honey is what tebs call anything they like; either they can’t tell the difference, or more likely their primitive vocal chords are incapable of enunciating more than a few simple words which they barely understand, much the way a myna bird can ask for cracker without knowing exactly what it is.

  Now more tebs are coming out of the high grass: a pack of living teddy bears, the result of radical reconfiguration of the DNA of Ursus americanus, the American black bear. Never growing larger than cubs and bred for docility, they’re as harmless as house cats, as friendly as beagles. The perfect companion for a child, except when people buy them for all the wrong reasons. And now the woods are full of them.

  “Honey! Oh, boy, honey!” Now the tebs are clambering onto the chairs, grabbing the beer cartons between the soft paws of their forelegs and draining them into their mouths. A perfect little teddy bear picnic. They’re happy as can be, right up until the moment when Jimmy Ray squeezes the trigger.

  The first bullet strikes the largest teb in the chest, a clean shot that kills it even before it knows it’s dead. The teb sitting in the next chair hasn’t had time to react before the back of its head is blown off; the first two gunshots are echoing off the trees when the other tebs begin throwing themselves off the table, squeaking in terror. Jimmy Ray’s third and fourth shots go wild, but his fifth shot manages to wing a small teb who was a little too slow. It screams as it topples from its chair; by now the rest of the pack are fleeing for the woods, leaving behind the dead and wounded.

  “Damn!” Jimmy Ray quickly jams more four more rounds into the rifle, then fires into the high grass where the tebs are running. “Quick lil’ bastards, ain’t they?”

  He spits out his chaw, then he reloads again before slamming open the shed door and stalking across the clearing to the table. He ignores the two dead tebs, walks over to the one he wounded. It’s trying to crawl away, a thick red smear against the side of its chest. Seeing Jimmy Ray, it falls over on its back, raises its paws as if begging for mercy.

  “I…I…I wuv you so much!” Something it might have once said to a six-year-old girl, before her father decided that keeping it was too much of a hassle and abandoned it out here.

  “Yeah, I wuv you too, Pooh.” And then Jimmy Ray points the rifle muzzle between its eyes and finishes the job.

  We spend another half-hour stalking the surviving members of the pack, but the other tebs have vanished, and before long Jimmy Ray notices vultures beginning to circle the clearing. He returns to the picnic table and checks out his kills. Two males and a female; even though he’s disappointed that he couldn’t have bagged any more, at least he’s still within the season limit.

  So he ties their legs to a tree branch, and together we haul the three dead tebs back his truck. Jimmy Ray absently whistles an old Lynyrd Skynyrd song as he dumps two of the corpses in the back of his truck; for the hell of it, he lashes the body of the biggest one to the front hood, just to give him bragging rights when he drops by the bar for a quick one on the way home.

  He’s pleased with himself. Three pelts he can sell to a furrier, some fresh meat for his dogs, and another head for the collection in his den. Not bad, all things considered. He climbs into the truck, stuffs some more Red Man into his face, then slaps a CD into the deck.

  “But y’know what’s even more fun?” he asks as he pulls away. “Next month, it’s unicorn season. Now there’s good eatin’!”

  Then he puts the pedal to the metal and away we go, with a dead teddy bear tied to the hood and “Sweet Home Alabama” blasting from the speakers. It’s a great day to be alive.

  MOREAU2

  Carson and Mariano were the sole survivors of the crash; everyone else was killed. Upon later reflection, Phil would realize that the only reason why he and George made it through was that they had been in the back of the spacecraft; the military lander had come down nose-first, so the pilot and co-pilot died instantly, and the two Marines from the 4th Space riding in the forward section of the passenger compartment were crushed when the cockpit bulkhead collapsed upon them.

  So it was all a matter of luck, really. If the seating arrangements been reversed before they departed Olympus Station, if the Pax Astra heatseeker the pilots were trying to avoid before they lost control had made a direct hit, if the craft had rolled over upon impact, if its fuel tanks had exploded…no sense in trying to second-guess fate. They were alive, and that’s all there was to it.

  But Mariano was unconscious, and when Carson pulled him from the wreckage he noticed that his right leg was twisted at a bad angle. Phil didn’t know enough first-aid to help him even if he wasn’t wearing a moonsuit; at least his suit was still intact, and when Phil pushed back George’s helmet visor, he saw a white smudge of vapor against the faceplate. That’s when he knew for certain the photographer was still among the living.

  Burying the dead was pointless. The pilots were entombed within the craft, and he would have wasted precious air attempting to dig graves for the two Marines in the lunar regolith. When Phil climbed back into the lander to see if he could salvage anything useful, he found a helmet resting a couple meters away from the moonsuit to which it had once been attached. It took a few moments for him to realize that the helmet wasn’t a spare, and the significance of the red ice frozen around the suit’s collar ring. He turned away and took several deep breaths, and somehow managed not to get sick.

  Some reporter he was: he couldn’t remember the names of the soldiers who’d died.

  Pulling a seat cushion out of the ship, Phil lashed George to it with a safety belt, then found some severed electrical cables and used them to fashion a crude harness. He also found an undamaged carbine, but decided against taking it; if he was picked up by a Pax squad, carrying a weapon might invalidate his status as a non-com. He located Mariano’s camera bag, and as an afterthought he looped its strap around the photographer’s neck. If he knew George, he’d throw a fit if he woke up to find that his rig had been left behind.

  The electronic compass on his helmet’s heads-up told him which direction was west. He pulled up a map overlay, and discovered that the dead volcano upon the horizon was Sosigenes. He had no idea how far away it was; he’d already been warned that ground distance was difficult to determine on the Moon. With any more luck, they might be able to reach it before their air ran out. And, after all, Sosigenes had been their destination in the first place…

  So off he went across the Sea of Tr
anquility, trying to avoid the larger rocks in his way as he dragged Mariano behind him. One-sixth gravity helped a little bit, but not much; the stretcher prohibited him from making bunny-hops, and after awhile it didn’t seem as if there was any real difference. At first he maintained radio silence, for fear that any transmissions might bring another missile down upon him, until he realized that the radio was his only real hope of being rescued before his air supply was used up. So he switched it back on and toggled to the emergency band. No one responded to his calls for help, though, and soon he was singing “Little Red Rooster” over and over, just to keep him himself company. It was the only song he could remember offhand, but his father had sung it with his platoon during Gulf War II, and just now it seemed appropriate.

  About an hour after he left the crash site, Phil caught a faint flicker from the corner of his eye. He turned to look, and saw a bright starburst above the southern horizon. A moment later, he spotted another one, like distant fireworks on the Fourth of July. Then he glimpsed tiny pinpricks of light racing across the sky, low to the ground in the approximate direction of Arago Crater, and realized what he was witnessing: a battle between the Pax Astra Free Militia and the 4th Space Infantry.

  Too bad he didn’t know how to operate George’s camera. It would have made an excellent shot to accompany his dispatch from the front. If he lived to write it, that is.

  Phil was within sight of the long, deep rill separating him from Sosigenes, and was beginning to wonder how he was going to get around it (and trying to forget the fact that he had less than fifteen minutes of oxygen left; he hadn’t checked Mariano’s suit lately, so he had no idea whether his companion was alive or not) when he saw something moving several kilometers away. At first he thought it was a sunlight reflecting off the silver-gray dust that marred his visor, but as he watched it became a white object, kicking up fantails of regolith as it skirted boulders and small impact craters.