I’ve never seen them. They arrived in the usual B-movie way—telepathic message from An Incredibly Advanced Alien Race—and chose two human beings to be “special.” That’s how they put it. One was me. The other was a woman, I think. We weren’t in any position to argue. They just took us. “We will treat them as children,” they announced. “We will help them be as innocent and happy as children should be—as all our children are.”
Was I excited to be chosen—an out-of-shape (not proud of it), 45-year-old yogurt distributor from Kansas City, unhappily divorced, no living children, an obsession with sports memorabilia, and bored with the grind? “Worried” would be the better word. How, I asked myself, would aliens (advanced or not) define “special”? How would they even define “child”? I could end up gray matter in a cyborg ship or a yappy pet with ten heads.
So here I am. The stars call like a bad habit, and I find myself, even when asleep, heading out there, flapping and flapping, pain shooting through my bones, and then, airless, falling like Icarus. But my lungs are happier up there than down here, where it hurts to breathe. It’s bad planning, as if they don’t get what a body is about.
So I do a lot of coughing when I walk, and my legs feel like the legs of an 80-year-old, about as useful as a pterodactyl’s must have been. I try to feel the sun on my skin—that would be nice (the Child of the Gods gets a tan)—but the nerves are missing. They’ve given me this raging heart, this heat machine, so I won’t be cold when I’m flying up where I shouldn’t be flying; but the tradeoffs are hell.
I don’t have a mouth because I haven’t been given one. My lips are like a wound that’s healed. I’d ask them why, but I can’t. They’ve given me a body that doesn’t need food, so I don’t need a mouth, but every day words flutter like mad butterflies in my throat and I want to let them loose.
I’ve been given four arms with webbed fingers on each hand. My arms, easily confused, get tangled with my wings when I try to fly. When the wings finally catch the wind, the arms calm down. But for that moment flying feels impossible.
It’s a shitty situation.
What I’ve found on this planet, this kingdom of mine—the one they’ve given me—looks pretty impressive, however: forests, deserts, lakes, mountains, seas, valleys, rivers, and meadows; insects, birds, and animals of all types. When the little things are near me (tree or animal), I can’t see them. They’re blurred. But when I stand in a valley at night and look at a distant mountain, I see a scampering mole snatched up by an owl with a hungry hiss, fur floating down like a slow song from the tree as it eats. It’s beautiful.
If I hover over the ocean as dawn breaks and I look toward shore, I see perfectly, miles away, the red eyes of the birds with their stick-like legs and long bills pecking at the mud for tiny crab-like things. And the eight legs of the crab-like things kick frantically as the birds swallow them. And the lice move happily through the tiniest of feathers on those birds’ heads. I don’t know why, but for some reason this makes me happy.
Maybe it’s because I can’t see what’s near me that I can’t see the Gods, that I can’t tell whether the voices I hear (if I’m really hearing them) are mine or theirs. But maybe it’s that I haven’t looked far enough—beyond mountains, beyond seas. That’s what it feels like (because they want me to?): That I haven’t looked far enough.
“Why did you make me this way?” I ask, and it’s my voice all right—the one my ex heard every morning for years, the one my sales staff had to put up with. It’s mine, but it sounds like someone else’s voice and someone else’s life.
The engines of the stars rumble. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s nothing I would have known in Kansas City, in that body I had. I don’t know that words can say it.
The night turns red and blue—the universe turns red and blue—in my eyes, which are closed.
They answer with the voices of the moles, birds, lice, rocking sea, timeless mountains and light that dwells in the darkness within the light. It sounds, if it has a sound, like my own voice, the one I once had and might have if I had a mouth to emit one.
“We did not make you,” the voices say.
“You are the Gods and I am your child. Of course you made me…”
The engines race.
“You were given to us,” the voices say. “You were given to us the way you are. There was no planet called Earth. There was no Missouri, no dairy product to be distributed and consumed, no little boy—your son—who died at the birthday party that day, filling you with a grief that drove others away. All of that was a dream you brought with you when you were given to us.” The voices pause. “You have been with us forever, given to us in the beginning the way you are.”
“But you are the Gods,” I say again, the words coming as if from a child. “If you did not make me,” I continue, my voice my son’s, “who is there for me so that I might mean as much as the little crabs the birds eat on the mud, or the lice on their heads, or sand on the shore? Who is there in the darkness within the light to make the words fluttering in my throat mean what they might mean were you the Gods who made me?”
A voice that must be theirs, not mine, answers: “We make of the universe what we are given—what no one else wants. We take it and make it ours.”
Looking down at the world, I see that it’s true. How the jaw of a wildcat with funny ears and a single eye in its forehead opens, yawning. How an ape with hooves and a bleeding hand picks up a stone despite the pain and looks at it with a plan. How in the mountain range across the sea the tallest mountain collapses and in its fire a million insects, birds and animals vaporize, but none of this matters because others will come. They always come.
“What am I then?” I hear myself ask, the litany like a new religion.
“There are no mirrors here yet,” the voices are saying, “because we haven’t been given them. But we can show you what you would see were you to look in one.”
I kick near the stars, high above the planet that’s mine, wings tiring, and cry:
”But I can’t see up close!”
“Yes, you can,” the moles shout back, speaking for the Gods and everything else as the little crab-like things whisper, “Yes, you can. Just look—”
They’re right, of course. I can see. I look, and as I do, the Gods show themselves, and I see at last what I am, and I know why.
“So that I am yours. Really yours.”
Yes, Child, they answer.
It is done.
“But what about her?” I want to ask—that other voice, that other me, the old, fading dream. “The second one you chose? Brittany or Tiffany—some silly name like that. When is she coming and will she look like me?”
But I don’t. They’ll tell me it’s a dream, and I barely remember the question.
Original (First) Publication
Copyright © 2013 by Bruce McAllister
The late Charles Sheffield was a master of hard science fiction. He also served as the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and of the American Astronautical Society. He won the Nebula and Hugo for his novelette “Georgia on My Mind,” which is included in his collection Georgia on My Mind and Other Places, as is the following story.
--------------
THE FEYNMAN SALTATION
by Charles Sheffield
The worm in the apple; the crab in the walnut…Colin Trantham was adding fine black bristles to the crab’s jointed legs when the nurse called him into the office.
He glanced at his watch as he entered. “An hour and a quarter the first time. Forty minutes the second. Now he sees me in nine minutes. Are you trying to tell me something?”
The nurse did not reply, and Dr. James Wollaston, a pudgy fifty-year-old with a small mouth and the face of a petulant baby, did not smile. He gestured to a chair, and waited until Trantham was seated on the other side of his desk.
“Let me dispose of the main point, then we can chat.” Wollaston was totally lacking in bedside manner, which
was one of the reasons that Colin Trantham liked him. “We have one more test result to come, but there’s little doubt as to what it will show. You have a tumor in your left occipital lobe. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s quite operable.”
“Quite?”
“Sorry. Completely operable. We should get the whole thing.” He stared at Trantham. “You don’t seem surprised by this.”
Colin pushed the drawing across the table: the beautifully detailed little crab, sitting in one end of the shelled walnut. “I’m not an idiot. I’ve been reading and thinking cancer for weeks. I suppose it’s too much to hope it might be benign?”
“I’m afraid not. It is malignant. But it appears to be a primary site. There are no other signs of tumors anywhere in your body.”
“Wonderful. So I only have cancer once.” Trantham folded the drawing and tucked it away in his jacket breast pocket. “Am I supposed to be pleased?”
Wollaston did not answer. He was consulting a desk calendar and comparing it with a typed sheet. “Friday is the twenty-third. I would like you in the night before, so we can operate early.”
“I was supposed to go to Toronto this weekend. I have to sign a contract for a set of interior murals.”
“Postpone it.”
“Good. I was afraid you’d say cancel.”
“Postpone it for four weeks.” Wollaston was pulling another folder from the side drawer of his desk. “I propose to get you Hugo Hemsley. He and I have already talked. He’s the best surgeon east of the Rockies, but he has his little ways. He’ll want to know every symptom you’ve had from day one before he’ll pick up a scalpel. How’s the headache?”
The neurologist’s calm was damping Colin’s internal hysteria. “About the same. Worst in the morning.”
“That is typical. Your first symptom was colored lights across your field of vision, sixty-three days ago. Describe that to me....”
***
The muffled thump on the door was perfunctory, a relic of the days when Colin Trantham had a live-in girlfriend. Julia Trantham entered with a case in one hand and a loaded paper bag held to her chest with the other, pushing the door open with her foot and backing through.
“Grab this before I drop it.” She turned and nodded down at the bag. “Bought it before I thought to ask. You allowed to drink?”
“I didn’t ask, either.” Colin examined the label on the bottle. “Moving up in the world. You don’t get a Grands Echézeaux of this vintage for less than sixty bucks.”
“Seventy-two plus tax. When did you memorize the wine catalog?”
“I’m feeling bright these days. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
“No points for that. Everybody quotes Johnson.” Julia Trantham pulled the cork and sniffed it, while her brother was reaching up into the cabinet for two eight-ounce glasses.
“You’re late.” Colin Trantham placed the thin-stemmed goblets on the table and watched as Julia poured, a thin stream of dark red wine. His sister’s face was calm, but the tremor in her hand was not. “The plane was on time. You went to see Wollaston, didn’t you, before you came here?”
“You’re too smart for your own good. I did.”
“What did you find out?”
Julia Trantham took a deep breath. Colin had always been able to see through her lies, it would be a mistake to try one now. “It’s a glioblastoma. A neuroglial cell tumor. And it’s Type Four. Which means—”
“I know what it means. As malignant as you can get.” Colin Trantham picked up his glass, emptied it in four gulps, and walked over to stand at the sink and stare out of the kitchen window. “Christ. You still have the knack of getting the truth out of people, don’t you? I had my little interview with Dr. Hemsley, but he didn’t get as honest as that. He talked procedure. Day after tomorrow he saws open my skull, digs in between the hemispheres, and cuts out a lump of my brain as big as a tennis ball. Local anesthetic—he wants me conscious while he operates.”
“Probably wants you to hold tools for him. Like helping to change a car tire. Sounds minor.”
“Minor for him. He gets five thousand bucks for a morning’s work. And it’s not his brain.”
“Minor operation equals operation on somebody else.”
“One point for that. Wish it weren’t my brain, either. It’s my second favorite organ.”
“No points—that’s Woody Allen in Sleeper. You’re all quotes today.”
Colin Trantham sat down slowly at the kitchen table. “I’m trying, Julia. It’s just not…easy.”
The casual brother-sister jousting shattered and fell away from between them like a brittle screen. Julia Trantham dropped into the seat opposite. “I know, Colin. It’s not easy. It’s awful. My fault. I’m not handling this well.”
“Not your fault. Everybody’s. Mine too, same problem. You go through life, build your social responses. Then you get a situation they just don’t cover. Who wants to talk about dying, for Christ’s sake?” There was a long silence, but the tension was gone. Colin Trantham stared at his older sister’s familiar face, unseen for half a year. “I’m scared, Julie. I lie awake at night, and I think, I won’t make old bones.”
Little brother, hurt and crying. We’re grown-ups now. We haven’t hugged in twenty years. “Social responses. I’m supposed to say, don’t be scared, Col, you’ll be fine. But while I say it I’m thinking, you’re scared, no shit? Of course you’re scared. Me, I’d be petrified. I am petrified.”
“Will you stay until the operation’s over?”
“I was planning to. If it’s all right with you, I’ll hang around until you’re out of the hospital. Write up a paper on extinct invertebrates that I’ve had in the mill for a while.” She poured again into both glasses, emptying the bottle. “Any girlfriend that I need to know about, before I embarrass her by my drying panty hose?”
“Rachel. Just a now-and-again thing.” Colin Trantham picked up the empty bottle and stared at the layer of sediment left in the bottom, divining his future. “Should we have decanted it? I hardly tasted that first glass. I’ll try to sip it this time with due reverence.” The raw emotion was fading, the fence of casual responses moving back into position. “No problem with Rachel. If she finds you here with me I’ll just pretend you’re my sister.”
***
The waiting room was empty. Julia dithered on the threshold, possessed by conflicting desires. She wanted news, as soon as it was available. She also wanted a cigarette, more than she had ever wanted one, but smoking was forbidden anywhere in the hospital.
Dr. Wollaston solved her problem before she could. He approached along the corridor behind her and spoke at once: “Good news. It went as well as it possibly could go.”
The nicotine urge was blotted out by a rush of relief.
“Minimum time in the operating room,” the neurologist went on. “No complications.” He actually summoned a smile. “Sedated now, but he wanted you to see this. He said that you would know exactly what it means.”
He held out a piece of paper about five inches square. At its center, in blue ink, a little figure of a hedgehog leered out at Julia, cheeks bulging. She could feel her own cheeks burning. “That’s me—according to Colin. Private family joke.”
“Drawn right after the operation, when Hemsley was testing motor skills. Astonishing, I thought.”
“Can I see him?”
“If you wish, although he might not recognize you at the moment. He should be sleeping. Also”—a second of hesitation, picking words carefully—“I would appreciate a few minutes of your time. Perhaps a glass of wine, after what I know has been a trying day for you. This is”—Julia sensed another infinitesimal pause—“primarily medical matters. I need to talk to you about your brother.”
How could she refuse? Walking to the wine bar, Julia realized that he had talked her out of seeing Colin, without seeming to do so. Typical James Wollaston, according to Colin. Gruff, so
metimes grumpy; but smart.
His eyes were on her as they settled in on the cushioned round stools across a fake hogshead table, and she took out and lit a cigarette.
“How many of those a day?”
“Five or six.” Julia took one puff and laid down the burning cigarette in the ashtray. “Except I’m like every other person who smokes five—a pack lasts me a day and a half.”
“You’re going to regret it. It’s murder on your skin. Another ten years and you’ll look like a prune.”
“Skin? I thought you were going to tell me about my heart and lungs.”
“For maximum effect, you have to hit where it’s least expected. You ought to give it up.”
“I was going to. I really was. But you know what happened? Since Mother died, Colin and I have called each other every week.”
“Sunday midday.”
“That’s right. How’d you know?”
“I know a lot about you and Colin.”
“Then you know Colin’s not one for overstatement. He hadn’t said a word about…all this. When the evidence was in, he hit me with it all at once. It floored me. I’d got up that morning determined that I was through, that was it for cigarettes. I’d just thrown a near-full pack away.” She laughed shakily. “Looks like I picked a hell of a day to quit smoking.”
“That’s from Airplane. No points, I think your brother would say.”
“My God. You really do know a lot about us.”
“When it was clear to me that Colin might have a serious problem, I put him through my biggest battery of tests, checking his memory and his reflexes and his logical processes. We also went over all his background. As a result I know a great deal about you, too, your background, what you do.” He paused. “I even understood about the hedgehog, though it didn’t seem the best time and place to mention it. Anyway, how’s the paleontology business?”
“Just scratching out a living. Sorry. Programmed response. In a very interesting state. You see, every few years there’s a major upheaval—facts, or theories. New radioactive dating, punctuated equilibrium, Cretaceous extinctions, mitochondrial DNA tracking, the reinterpretation of the Burgess Shale. Well, it seems we’re in for another one. A biggie.”
Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2: May 2013 Page 16