Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “The Emmic pretty much coexist with them, I think. Sometimes, though, they eat them.”

  Atticus averted his gaze from the hap. “Come on, Artie. Give your old father a break.”

  “Sorry, Dad.” Arturo placed the cage on the floor. “But the fact they’re such a successful species fascinates me. They live in the spaces between our lives, co-opting the cracks and crevices of our shelters and picking up our crumbs and leftovers. Mr. Ettinger calls their survival mode a strategy of ‘interstitial opportunism.’”

  “Did he make that up himself, Mr. Ettinger?”

  “Probably. He’s a sesquipedalian scion of prenatal illegitimacy, with an innate proclivity for polysyllabic persiflage.”

  “Well, I hope he recovers.” And Atticus laughed with his son, grateful that the youngster had accurately read his mood and wisely interrupted his lecture on Happicus eromicus with a silly joke. A high-IQ joke that Atticus would have defensively ridiculed in his own student days, but a joke for all that. Artie might yet be a winner.

  “Good night, son.”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  Back in his own room, Atticus curled down into the nest and laid his muzzle across his wife’s velour-soft backside. Her musky smell did not so much stimulate him tonight as offer a soothing olfactory lullaby.

  “Renata’s still angry with you,” Tamara whispered.

  “Oh God, do you want me to go up there, too?”

  “That’s not necessary,” said Renata from her loft. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  That fluffy female had ears like an ICBM warning system.

  “Reni,” Atticus began, staring upward myopically. “Reni, I—”

  “Forget it, Daddy. Artie’s always been your favorite, your little baby. I don’t suppose I should expect any change in your twilight years. Don’t worry, though. I’ll soon be out from under your and Mom’s fur. One more quarter and that’s it. I’m gone.”

  “Renata—”

  “I’m not talking to you, Daddy. I’m really not.” And she refused to respond to anything else that he said. He could hear her burrowing down into her nest, burrowing down with a will and a vengeance.

  Then, but for the traffic noises filtering up through the heating ducts, the apartment was silent—deathly silent. In spite of his own agitation, Tamara and Renata went quickly to sleep, and he knew that Arturo, too, had by now surrendered to dreamland. Only he of all the Norvegs had not yet succumbed, and a thousand regrets and worries laid siege to his disarmed consciousness, fluttering through his brain like great ravenous moths hungry for his memories or his self-recriminations. He lay totally at their mercy. He lay totally incapacitated by circumstance.

  “No, you don’t,” Atticus told himself. “Hang on. Hang on.”

  This whispered self-encouragement steadied him somewhat. Although he still could not sleep, he held the moths of night madness at bay, imagining a world where sunlight spangled a forest floor and the weather was a caress instead of an automobile wreck. He descended toward the illusory promise of peace. If he did not quite sleep, he treaded a territory nearby.

  A scurrying there in his and Tamara’s room yanked him back to the moment. His whiskers tingled and his nose went up. He could feel his eyes adjusting to the dark, but still could not see anything. More scurrying. Haps lurked all around the perimeter of the room, Atticus convinced himself—inside the walls and ventilation system, little armies of vermin. It was Trust Avenue revisited, where he had once come upon two of the brazen critters untying a birthday ribbon from his little sister’s neck.

  Careful not to disturb Tamara, Atticus crept from their nest and flipped on the light. Nothing. Not a hap in view. After plunging the room into darkness again, he returned to his wife’s side. Interstitial opportunism, eh? Well, they weren’t yet interstitial enough to suit Atticus Norveg, not by a long shot. Until they were both soundless and invisible, he would regard their presence in his apartment as a personal affront, a challenge to the comfortable and cleanly way of life that he’d tried to forge for his family. Tomorrow he might call in a professional pest-control service. No one was going to mock his daughter with the epithet “Happy Renata,” even if she did sometimes treat him abominably and likewise he her.

  But the scurrying had ceased. Atticus had frightened the haps, who had apparently retreated for the night. Fine. He could resume their war in the morning. Besides, his wife’s musky scent—along with the dainty systaltic motion of her flanks—had begun to lull him toward the suspension bridge of sleep. At last he crossed it. Even when one of its metal cables snapped, momentarily jolting his eyes open, he did not try to retrace his steps to the worrisome realms of wakefulness.

  The first thing he heard the following morning was the television set, tuned to a network news program.

  “That efficating box,” he muttered. “You’d think our kids had grown up inside one of the blasted things and never discovered a way out.”

  “It’s Renata,” Tamara cautioned him. “It’s for her current-events symposium at City College.”

  “Whatever happened to reading?”

  “You’re not much of a reader, Atticus. Don’t bully her this morning, too. Let’s all have a nice breakfast together.”

  So Atticus lumbered penitently to the kitchen to put on water for coffee. He nodded at Renata as he passed the living room, but either she was too involved in her newscast to return his greeting or her anger at him had not yet dissipated. Arturo, who might have had a friendly word for him, continued to nose about in his loft dressing and gathering up school materials.

  In the kitchen Atticus remembered his trap. He pulled open the door beneath the sink and peered into the musty darkness there. A hap lay helplessly pinioned in the trap. The creature still lived, one of its tiny legs mangled by the spring bar. It had torn off its garment trying to free itself, and Atticus stared unhappily at a piece of blue nest casing lying in a spill of detergent granules. Alternating currents of chagrin and pity surged through him, for he had not expected to find the victim of his first extermination ploy still conscious, still kicking, a reproach to his methods.

  “Oh no,” moaned Atticus.

  He picked up the base of the wooden trap so that the hap could not scratch or bite him, then lifted the entire mechanism into the light. The creature’s naked body hung upside-down from the spring bar, dangling like an entrail or a miscarried fetus. When its eyes intercepted Atticus’s, they shone with intelligence: minute sapphire sparks. Indeed, Atticus wondered if the hap had chosen the blue material of his and Tamara’s nest casing to match the color of its own flame-bright eyes.

  “They can’t do that!” Renata shouted from the living room. “Who the hell do those bastards think they are!”

  “What is it?” Mrs. Norveg called from even deeper in the small apartment. “What’s wrong? That’s not the sort of language we’ve taught you to—”

  “Oh, the unfeeling, stinking animals!”

  Atticus, having thought to spare the hap before anyone realized that he had captured it, shuffled about bemusedly, distracted from his half-formed intention by the anguished cries of his daughter.

  “Do you know what those murdering Sorsuni have done?” Renata shouted now. “They’ve dropped timed-release chemical defoliants on the Emmic hardwood forests, that’s what! The Sorsuni ambassador here labels the reports the beginnings of a new propaganda campaign against his country, but the network has already documented hundreds of Emmic fatalities! Come in here, Daddy! Come in here, Mom! They’re showing the victims receiving treatment in one of the makeshift aid stations just over the Sorsuni border! Oh God, it’s horrible!”

  Atticus’s flanks began to tremble. Renata had just spoken to him, but O! at what terrible prompting. The jests of history, Lord, how they did put matter in a poor rat’s eyes. Well, he had better go to Renata; the Sorsuni and network news had given them a bitter pretense for reconciliation, and only a sorry father would let that pretense slip away.

&nb
sp; The hap? Well, it was only a hap, an interstitial opportunist that had misjudged the dimensions of its happiness. Half a world away, intelligent creatures of Atticus’s own species were undergoing annihilation at the behest of a barbarian regime. How could he reasonably feel any pity for this filthy little beast?

  At the sink Atticus lifted the bar from the hap’s leg and shook the creature into the garbage disposal. Activated, the unit’s maw gurgled and pureed. A little disinfectant sloshed about the drain mouth took care of germs and odors, while a good hard spray of water from the hose atop the sink washed away any telltale signs of the hap’s whirlwind dissolution. Atticus reset the trap and put it back under the sink.

  Then, mind almost at ease, he trotted into the living room to comfort his outraged daughter.

  Herding with the Hadrosaurs

  IN ’08, MY PARENTS—PIERCE AND EULOGY GREGSON of Gipsy, Missouri—received permission to cross the geologic time-slip west of St. Joseph. They left in a wood-paneled New Studebaker wagon, taking provisions for one month, a used ’Zard-Off scent-generator, and, of course, their sons, sixteen-year-old Chad (me) and five-year-old Cleigh, known to all as “Button.” Our parents rejected the security of a caravan because Daddy had only contempt for “herders,” detested taking orders from external authority, and was sure that when we homesteaded our new Eden beyond the temporal divide, reptile men, claim jumpers, and other scalawags would show up to murder and dispossess us. It struck him as politic to travel alone, even if the evident dangers of the Late Cretaceous led most pioneers to set forth in groups.

  That was Pierce Gregson’s first, biggest, and, I suppose, last mistake. I was almost a man (just two years away from the vote and only an inch shy of my adult height), and I remember everything. Sometimes, I wish I didn’t. The memory of what happened to our folks only two days out from St. Jo, on the cycad-clotted prairie of the old Dakotas, pierces me yet. In fact, this account is a eulogy for our folks and a cri de coeur I’ve been holding back for almost thirty years.

  (Sweet Seismicity, let it shake my pain.)

  The first things you notice crossing over, when agents of the World Time-Slip Force pass you through the discontinuity locks, are the sharp changes in temperature and humidity. The Late Cretaceous was—in many places, at least—hot and moist. So TSF officials caution against winter, spring, or fall crossings. It’s best to set out, they say, in late June, July, or August, when atmospheric conditions in northwestern Missouri are not unlike those that hold, just beyond the Nebraska drop-off, in the Upper Mesozoic.

  Ignoring this advice, we left in February. Still, our New Stu wagon (a dubious cross between a Conestoga wagon and a high-tech ankylosaur) plunged us into a strength-sapping steam bath. All our first day, we sweated. Even the sight of clown-frilled triceratops browsing among the magnolia shrubs and the palmlike cycads of the flood plains did nothing to cool our bodies or lift our spirits. It was worse than going to a foreign country knowing nothing of its language or mores—it was like crawling the outback of a bizarre alien planet.

  Button loved it. Daddy pretended that the heat, the air, the grotesque fauna—all of which he’d tried to get us ready for—didn’t unsettle him. Like turret-gunners, Mama and I kept our eyes open. We missed no chance to gripe about the heat or our wagon’s tendency to lurch, steamroller seedling evergreens, and vibrate our kidneys. Daddy, irked, kept his jaw set and his fist on the rudder knob, as if giving his whole attention to steering would allow him to overcome every obstacle, physical or otherwise.

  It didn’t. On Day Two, twenty or thirty miles from the eastern shore of the Great Inland Sea, we were bumping along at forty-five or fifty mph when two tyrannosaurs—with thalidomide forelegs dangling like ill-made prosthetic hooks—came shuffle-waddling straight at us out of the north.

  Sitting next to Daddy, Button hooted in delight. Behind him, I leaned into my seat belt, gaping at the creatures in awe.

  The tyrannosaurs were stop-motion Hollywood mockups—except that, gleaming bronze and cordovan in the ancient sunlight, they weren’t. They were alive, and, as we all soon realized, they found our wagon profoundly interesting.

  “Isn’t that ’Zard-Off thing working?” Mama cried.

  Daddy was depressing levers, jiggling toggles. “It’s on, it’s on!” he said. “They shouldn’t be coming!”

  The scent generator in our wagon was supposed to aspirate an acrid mist into the air, an odor repugnant to saurians, carnivores and plant-eaters alike.

  But these curious T-kings were approaching anyway—proof, Mama and I decided, that our scent-generator, a secondhand model installed only a few hours before our departure, was a dud. And it was just like Daddy, the biggest of scrimps, to have paid bottom dollar for it, his perfectionism in matters not money-grounded now disastrously useless.

  “Daddy, turn!” I shouted. “We can outrun them!”

  To give him credit, Daddy had already ruddered us to the right and was squeezing F-pulses to the power block with his thumb. The plain was broad and open, but dotted with palmate shrubs, many of which looked like fluted pillars crowned by tattered green umbrella segments; we ran right over one of the larger cycads in our path before we’d gone thirty yards. Our wagon tilted on two side wheels, tried to right itself, and, failing that, crashed down on its passenger box with a drawn-out KRRRRR-ack!

  Mama screamed, Daddy cursed, Button yowled like a vivisected cat. I was deafened, dangling in an eerie hush from my seat belt. And then Button, upside-down, peered quizzically into my face while mouthing, urgently, a battery of inaudible riddles.

  Somehow, we wriggled out. So far as that goes, so did Daddy and Mama, although it would have been better for them—for all of us—if we had just played turtle.

  In fact, our folks undoubtedly struggled free of the capsized wagon to look for Button and me. What Button and I saw, huddled behind an umbrella shrub fifty yards away, was that awkward but disjointedly agile pair of T-kings. They darted at Mama and Daddy and seized them like rag dolls in their stinking jaws, one stunned parent to each tyrannosaur.

  Then the T-kings—lofty, land-going piranhas—shook our folks unconscious, dropped them to the ground, crouched on their mutilated bodies with crippled-looking fore claws, and vigorously tore into them with six-inch fangs.

  At intervals, they’d lift their huge skulls and work their lizardly nostrils as if trying to catch wind of something tastier. Button and I, clutching each other, would glance away. Through it all, I cupped my hand over Button’s mouth to keep him from crying out. By the time the T-kings had finished their meal and tottered off, my palm was lacerated from the helpless gnashing of Button’s teeth.

  And there we were, two scared human orphans in the problematic Late Cretaceous.

  Every year since recrossing the time-slip I see a report that I was a feral child, the only human being in history to have been raised by a nonmammalian species. In legend and literature, apes, wolves, and lions sometimes get credit for nurturing lost children, but no one is idiot enough to believe that an alligator or a Komodo dragon would put up with a human child any longer than it takes to catch, chew, and ingest it. No one should.

  On the other hand, although I, Chad Gregson, was too old to be a feral child, having absorbed sixteen years of human values at the time of our accident, my little brother Cleigh, or Button, wasn’t. And, indeed, it would probably not be wrong to say that, in quite a compelling sense, he was raised by hadrosaurs.

  I did all I could to pick up where our folks had left off, but the extended tribe of duckbills—corythosaurs—with whom we eventually joined also involved themselves in Button’s parenting, and I remain grateful to them. But I jump ahead of myself. What happened in the immediate aftermath of our accident?

  Button and I lay low. A herd of triceratops came snuffling through the underbrush, grunting and browsing. Overhead, throwing weird shadows on the plains, six or seven pterosaurs—probably vulturelike quetzalcoatli—circled our wagon’s wreck on thermal updrafts, weighing t
he advisability of dropping down to pick clean the bones of Pierce and Eulogy Gregson. They stayed aloft, for the departed T-kings may have still been fairly near, so Button and I likewise stayed aloof.

  Until evening, that is. Then we crept to the wagon—I held on to Button to keep him from trying to view the scattered, collopy bones of our folks—and unloaded as much gear as we could carry: T-rations, two wooden harmonicas, some extra all-cotton clothing, a sack of seed, etc. TSF officials allowed no synthetic items (even ’Zard-Off was an organic repellent, made from a Venezuelan herb) to cross a time-slip, for after an early period of supply-dependency, every pioneer was expected to “live off the land.”

  A wind blew down from the north. Suddenly, surprisingly, the air was no longer hot and moist; instead, it was warm and arid. We were on a Dead Sea margin rather than in a slash-and-burn Amazonian clearing. Our sweat dried. Hickories, oaks, and conifers grew among the horsetails along the meander of a river by the Great Inland Sea. Button and I crept through the glowing pastels of an archaic sunset, looking for fresh water (other than that sloshing in our leather botas) and shelter.

  Which is how, not that night but the following dawn, we bumped into the hadrosaurs that became our new family: a lambeosaurine tribe, each creature bearing on its ducklike head a hollow crest, like the brush on a Roman centurion’s helmet.

  Becoming family took a while, though, and that night, our first beyond the divide without our parents, Button snuggled into my lap in a stand of cone-bearing evergreens, whimpering in his dreams and sometimes crying out. Small furry creatures moved about in the dark, trotting or waddling as their unfamiliar bodies made them—but, bent on finding food appropriate to their size, leaving us blessedly alone. Some of these nocturnal varmints, I understood, would bring forth descendants that would evolve into hominids that would evolve into men. As creepy as they were, I was glad to have them around—they clearly knew when it was safe for mammals to forage. QED: Button and I had to be semisafe, too.