Bears Discover Fire

by Terry Bisson

“Not a what. A where-when point.”

  “When does the communication take place?” asked Hvarlgen.

  “Soon.” He was repeating himself. We were repeating ourselves. Was it my imagination, or did the Shadow seem weary?

  Hvarlgen, nothing if not democratic, turned her chair toward the lunies gathered in the doorway and on the bed.

  “Do any of you have any questions?”

  There were none.

  There was a long silence and the Shadow began to fade. I felt like I was seeing him for the last time, and I felt a sense of loss. It was my image that was fading away…

  “Wait!” I wanted to say. “Speak!” But I said nothing. Soon the Shadow was back in its bowl.

  “I have to get some sleep,” said Dr. Kim, taking a shot of PeaceAble.

  “Come on, Major,” said Hvarlgen. We left, taking the lunies with us.

  I made my own lunch, then watched a little bit of Bonnie and Clyde with the lunies. Like them, I was tired of the Moon. I was tired of the Shadow. Tired of waiting for either the communication, or the arrival of the Diana—both events over which we had no control.

  I took a walk around the little-used periphery tunnel that led from South to North via West. It was cold and smelly. Ahead of me I saw a new, unfamiliar light. I hurried to West, suspecting what it was. Forty kilometers away, the high ragged rim of 17,000-foot peaks at the western edge of Korolev was touched with sunlight.

  Dawn was still hours away, but it had already struck the tops of the nameless mountains, which were as bright in the sky as a new moon, the Moon’s moon, casting temporary backward shadows across the crater floor. Everything seemed reversed.

  I stood for what seemed like hours, watching. The dawn was as slow as an hour hand, and I grew cold.

  From West I cut straight through to East, even though I hadn’t been invited. Hvarlgen was still on the phone, and I felt like talking with somebody. Maybe Dr. Kim would be awake.

  The infirmary smelled like a Tennessee hayfield, bringing back sudden memories of childhood and summer. The Shadow was standing in the shadows under the magnolia, looking—worn out. Like an old person, I thought, he was fading away.

  Dr. Kim was staring straight up at the stars. His spraypipe had fallen from his fingers, onto the floor. He was dead.

  Dr. Kim had left four numbers in an envelope marked “Sunda,” with instructions that they were to be called as soon as he died, even though they lived in four different time zones, scattered around the Earth. They were his children. Most of them were awakened from sleep, but they weren’t surprised; Dr. Kim had already said his good-byes.

  As I watched Hvarlgen making the calls, for the first time in years I felt lonesome for the family I had never had.

  I wandered from Grand Central back down to East. Dr. Kim’s body had been put in the airlock to decompress slowly, and the room was empty except for the Shadow, which stood silently at the foot of the bed, like a mourner. I lay down on Dr. Kim’s bed and looked up through the magnolia, trying to imagine what his eyes had last seen. The dawn light still hadn’t touched the dome, and the galaxies hung in the sky like sparks from a burning city.

  Hvarlgen came to get me, and we held a brief service in Grand Central. Dr. Kim’s body was still in the airlock, but the Portable Dante and the spraypipe on the table represented him. The lunies attended in shifts, since they were preparing the station for incoming. Hvarlgen read something in Old Norse, then something in Korean, then a bit from the King James Bible about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

  Then we suited up.

  Burial on the moon is illegal according to at least three overlapping legal systems, but Hvarlgen didn’t seem to mind. Here’s Johnny and Sidrath had made LOI (lunar orbit insertion) and told her to finish before they landed, so they wouldn’t be compromised by her bending of the rules.

  The dawn was already halfway down the mountains by the time we locked out. Soon the raw sunlight would be racing, or at least loping, across the crater floor. The station would be livable for several more weeks, at least until mid-morning; but as we didn’t have proper suits for a sunlight EVA, even a dawn EVA, we would have to hurry.

  It was my first EVA in years. One of the lunies and I were the pallbearers (only two are needed on the Moon), while Hvarlgen followed in her fat-tired EVA chair. Even though we had decompressed Dr. Kim’s body as slowly as possible, he had still swelled in the vacuum. His face was filled out and he looked almost young.

  We carried him a hundred meters across the crater floor, to a fairly flat stone (flat stones are rare on the Moon), following the instructions we had found in the envelope. Dr. Kim had picked out his grave site from his bed in East.

  We laid him faceup on the table-shaped rock, the way they used to lay Indians so the vultures could swoop down to eat their hearts. Only here was a sky too deep for vultures. Hvarlgen read a few more words, and we started back.

  The crater floor was half lit by the mountains to the west. The sunlight had painted them from peak to foot; so that we cast long shadows—the “wrong” way. In a few weeks, as noon approached, with its 250-degree temperatures, it would cook Dr. Kim into bone and ash and vapor; until then he would lie in state letting the stars which he had studied for over half a century study him.

  When we locked back in, the chimes for incoming were ringing. Here’s Johnny and Sidrath had timed it all perfectly. Hvarlgen rolled off on two wheels to meet them; I was in no hurry. By the time I got to Grand Central, it was empty—everyone was greeting the Diana at South. I walked back down the tube to East. The bowl was gone; it had been returned to Other for Sidrath’s arrival. But the Shadow didn’t seem to notice. He was standing at the foot of the bed, no longer faded. For the first time he seemed to be looking directly at me. I didn’t know whether to say hello or good-bye. The Shadow seemed to be receding faster and faster, and me with him. I lost my balance and fell to one knee just as I “felt” what came to be known, much later, around the world, as the Brush.

  III

  Four days short of eleven months later, there was a knock at the door of my Road Lord.

  “Major Bewley?”

  “Call me Colonel,” I said.

  It was Here’s Johnny. He was wearing a faux leather suit that somehow told me he had gone ahead and taken retirement. I wasn’t surprised. He was on his way to Los Angeles to live with his sister. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  “Better than that,” I said. “You’re spending the night.”

  It was almost as if we were friends, and at my age almost is as good as the real thing, almost. I cleared a place on the couch (my picture—the same one—was in an eighteen-inch stack of magazines) and he sat down. Here’s Johnny had gained twenty pounds, which often happens to lunies when they lock in for good. I put on a fresh pot of coffee. It must have been the smell of the coffee that made us both think of Hvarlgen.

  “She’s in Reykjavik,” Here’s Johnny said. “When the film didn’t show anything, that was it for her. The last straw. She left the rest of it up to Sidrath and the Commission.”

  “The rest of what?” There was no more Shadow; both the image and the substance in the bowl had disappeared with the Brush. As promised. “What did they have left to do?”

  “All the surveys, interviews, population samples. All the stuff you’ve read about the Brush; it all came from Sidrath and the Commission. But without Hvarlgen’s help. Or yours, I happened to notice.”

  “I’d had enough, myself,” I said. “I felt like we were all getting a little crazy. That whole week was like a dream. Plus, there seemed, at the time, to be nothing to say. What I had experienced was, literally, as you know—as we all know now—indescribable. Since my contract was up, I sort of cut and ran because I didn’t want to be roped into some elaborate effort to figure it all out.”

  “And you thought you were the only one.”

  “Well, didn’t we all? At first, anyway.”

  It had taken several months of research to dete
rmine, positively, that every man, woman, and child on and off the planet (plus, it was now thought, a high percentage of dogs) had experienced the Brush at the same instant. We were no more able to describe it than the dogs were. It was intensely sensual but in no way physical, brilliantly colorful but not visible, musical but not quite a sound—an entirely new sensation, indescribable and unforgettable at the same time. The best description I heard was from an Indian filmmaker, who said it was as if someone had painted his soul with light. That’s poetic license, of course. It had happened in less than an instant, but it was days before anyone spoke of it, and weeks before the SETI Commission realized it was the communication we had been promised.

  By then it was only a memory. And lucky it was that we all had felt it: otherwise some of us would be spending the next few centuries trying to describe it to those who hadn’t. A new religion, maybe. As it was, most people on the planet were going about their business as if it had never happened, while a few were still trying to figure out what the Brush meant to the children. And the dogs.

  “It was a bitter disappointment to Hvarlgen,” said Here’s Johnny. It was late; we were sitting outside, having a whisky, waiting to catch the sunset.

  “I know,” I said. “To her, it was an insult. She called it the Brush-off. I can understand her point of view. We are finally contacted by another, maybe the only other life-form in the Universe, but it has nothing to say. No more than a hello, how are you. A wave from a passing ship, she called it.”

  “Maybe because it happened to everybody,” Here’s Johnny said.

  “I can understand that too,” I said. “We all thought it was going to be just for us.”

  One of my unofficial grandsons rode up on a bicycle carrying a turtle. I gave him a dollar for it, and put it into a polyboard box under the trailer with two other turtles. “I pay the kids for the ones they pick up off the road,” I said. “Then after sundown I let them go, away from the highway.”

  “Me, I’m more optimistic,” Here’s Johnny said. “Maybe the children who experienced the Brush will grow up different. Maybe smarter or less violent.”

  “Or maybe the dogs,” I said.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “You were, after all, the first contact.”

  “I was just the pattern for the protocol,” I said. “I got the same communication as everyone else, no more and no less. I’m convinced of that. I was just used to, you know, set up the tuning.”

  “You weren’t disappointed?”

  “I was disappointed that Dr. Kim didn’t get to experience it. But who knows, maybe he did. As for me, I’m an old man. I don’t expect things to mean anything. I just sort of enjoy them. Look there.”

  Off to the west, a range of barren peaks was hurling itself between Slab City and the nearest star, painting our trailers with new darkness. The clash of photons set up a barrage of colors in the sky overhead. We watched the sun set in silence; then I got one end of the box and Here’s Johnny got the other, and we dragged it out to a pile of boulders at the edge of the desert and deposited the turtles onto the still-warm sand.

  “You do this every night?”

  “Why not?” I said. “Maybe it’s turtles all the way down.”

  But Here’s Johnny didn’t get the joke. Which goes to show, as Chuck Berry once said, you never can tell.

  Afterword

  I came to the short story both early and late. In 1964, after the birth of my eldest son, Nathaniel, I wrote a story about a kid born with wings. “George” won honorable mention in a Story magazine contest and made me fifty dollars.

  After a couple of false starts, though, I gave up the form entirely.

  Then in 1988, after two or three published novels, I wrote “Over Flat Mountain.” It was to me not really a story but the fictional illustration of a conceit—the Appalachians being all rolled up into one mountain; a goof, if you will.

  By this time I was a published SF and fantasy author, and when Ellen Datlow asked me if I had ever tried short fiction, I sent her this one with the warning that it was “not an OMNI story.”

  She told me she would decide what was and what wasn’t an OMNI story, thank you very much. And bought it.

  There’s nothing like an eighteen hundred dollar sale to revive an interest in short fiction.

  The rest of the stories in this book were written between 1988 and 1993.

  “The Two Janets” is, like “Over Flat Mountain,” the fictional illustration of a conceit that turned into a short story in spite of itself. Owensboro is my hometown.

  “They’re Made Out of Meat” has its inspiration in Allen Ginsberg’s reply to an interviewer who kept prattling on about their souls communing. “We’re just meat talking to meat,” the poet corrected him.

  “The Coon Suit” came to me in a vivid daydream while driving through Oldham County, Kentucky, twenty-five years ago, and never went away. I find most horror unintentionally funny; this story, which I thought funny, wound up in a horror anthology.

  “Cancion” is my attempt at capturing the unaccountable sadness I felt watching street singers in Madrid one Christmas Eve. It is (also unaccountably, perhaps) one of my favorites.

  “Carl’s Lawn & Garden” is my hymn to the Garden State.

  I thought of “Partial People” while driving over a box.

  “Are There Any Questions?” is what you might call a throwaway.

  I heard of a circular polluted area in Chicago called “the toxic doughnut” while I was reading Shirley Jackson’s biography; the two influences converged in a story.

  “By Permit Only” is still another environmental short story. It was written over Christmas, which probably accounts for its overheated sentimentality.

  It’s no coincidence that so many of my environmental stories are short shorts. Save a tree! Even beyond the paper, think how much imaginative timber is wasted on plot, background, character, action, and atmosphere. Better to dispense with them all! Like the lemon cream pie on Saturday Night Live (“No lemon, no cream, just pie”) these short shorts are all story.

  I associate the title story with my daughter, Kristen. We were driving on an interstate with beautiful timbered medians when I said, “I just got an idea for a story.” “What is it?” she asked. “All I know for sure is the title,” I said. I agree with Ted Mooney, author of the overlooked SF (well, sort of) masterpiece Easy Travel to Other Planets, that the title is (or can be) the target toward which you shoot the arrow of the story. In this case, a good title, “Bears Discover Fire,” gave me my best shot ever, going on to win the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Sturgeon awards, being published in Japan, Germany, and Russia, and even making a college lit anthology.

  “They’re Made Out of Meat” was a Nebula nominee; “Press Ann” was a Hugo nominee; and “Next” won The Chronic Rift TV show’s coveted Round Table award (a plastic device from a pizza box). Adapted for the stage, it was directed and produced at New York’s West Bank Theater by Donna Gentry (along with “They’re Made Out of Meat” and “Next”).

  “Two Guys from the Future” is my homage to Classical Time Travel Paradox Light Romantic Comedy.

  Years ago in Louisville, right after “George,” I wrote a story called “Mr. Zone” about a man to whom nothing ever happened. The story was never published but the character turned up (as Fox) in “England Underway.”

  Sheila Williams of Asimov’s has been kind enough to describe my short fiction as warm and charming.

  “Necronauts” is my attempt to undermine that image. Its origin is in a project by artist Wayne Barlowe; he and I once tried to think of a story to illustrate a series of paintings and drawings he called his “Guide to Hell.” The story reaffirms for me how much we all owe to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

  “The Message” is more of the old-time mad scientist stuff. Or maybe it’s “The Coon Suit” minus the dogs. Or maybe it’s “Bears” without fire (or hair).

  Every once in a while I find myself compelled to revisit the old domi
nions of hard SF—my home country as a reader, if not a writer. Voyage to the Red Planet was that among my novels; in the stories it is “The Shadow Knows.”

  Somehow, these visits home always seem to start with an old fellow returning to space. “Shadow,” my longest story, and “Meat,” one of my shortest, both deal with the same venerable SF theme: first contact.

  It was in the midst of writing these stories that I found “George” in the files of my literary ex-mother-in-law and read it, for the first time in years, with some trepidation. I was pleased to find that though I wouldn’t write it again, I wouldn’t change a word in it. Since it was noticed (if never published) by Whit Burnett of Story magazine, it is my connection with another era in literature; that also pleases me. And it is reassuring to me in another way.

  I have sometimes felt that I was a gate-crasher in the world of SF, passing off odd mainstream works as fantasy and science fiction in order to get them published. “George” assures me that I have, in fact, for better or worse, been a fantasy writer from jump, engaged in a long process of coming home.

  I hope you like these stories, the contrivances of my heart.

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