Analog SFF, December 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  After perhaps ten minutes, Harris pointed ahead. “Look. We're coming to an open space.” Audubon nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He too saw the bright sunshine that told of a break in the trees. The bird calls were very loud now, very near. “Would you call that honking?” Harris asked. Audubon only shrugged and slid forward.

  He peered out from in back of a cycad at the meadow beyond ... at the meadow, and at the honkers grazing on it. Then they blurred: tears of joy ran down his face.

  * * * *

  “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who hast preserved me alive to see such things,” he whispered, staring and staring.

  Harris stood behind a small spruce a few feet away. “Isn't that something. Isn't that something?” he said, his words more prosaic than his friend's, but his tone hardly less reverent.

  Eight honkers grazed there, pulling up grass with their bills: two males, Audubon judged, and half a dozen smaller females. The birds had a more forward-leaning posture than did the mounted skeletons in the Hanover museum. That meant they weren't so tall. The males probably could stretch their heads up higher than a man, but it wouldn't be easy or comfortable for them.

  And then they both moved toward the same female, and did stretch their necks up and up and up, and honked as loudly as ever they could, and flapped their tiny, useless wings to make themselves seem big and fierce. And, while they squabbled, the female walked away.

  Audubon started sketching. He didn't know how many of the sketches he would work up into paintings and how many would become woodcuts or lithographs. He didn't care, either. He was sketching honkers from life, and if that wasn't heaven it was the next best thing.

  “Which species are they, do you suppose?” Harris asked.

  Once, at least a dozen varieties of honker had roamed Atlantis’ plains and uplands. The largest couple of species, the so-called great honkers, birds of the easily accessible eastern lowlands, went extinct first. Audubon had studied the remains in Hanover and elsewhere to be ready for this day. Now it was here, and he still found himself unsure. “I ... believe they're what's called the agile honker,” he said slowly. “Those are the specimens they most resemble."

  “If you say they're agile honkers, why then, they are,” Harris said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise will have to change his mind, because you've got the creatures."

  “I want to be right.” But Audubon couldn't deny his friend had a point. “A shame to have to take a specimen, but..."

  “It'll feed us for a while, too.” The prospect didn't bother Harris. “They are supposed to be good eating."

  “True enough.” When Audubon had all the sketches he wanted of grazing honkers and of bad-tempered males displaying, he stepped out from behind the cycad. The birds stared at him in mild surprise. Then they walked away. He was something strange, but they didn't think he was particularly dangerous. Atlantean creatures had no innate fear of man. The lack cost them dearly.

  He walked after them, and they withdrew again. Harris came out, too, which likely didn't help. Audubon held up a hand. “Stay there, Edward. I'll lure them back."

  Setting down his shotgun, he lay on his back in the sweet-smelling grass, raised his hips, and pumped his legs in the air, first one, then the other, again and again, faster and faster. He'd made pronghorn antelope on the Terranovan prairie curious enough to approach with that trick. What worked with the wary antelope should work for agile honkers as well. “Are they coming?” he asked.

  “They sure are.” Harris chuckled. “You look like a damn fool—you know that?"

  “So what?” Audubon went on pumping. Yes, he could hear the honkers drawing near, hear their calls and then hear their big, four-toed feet tramping through the grass.

  When he stood up again, he found the bigger male only a few feet away. The honker squalled at him; it didn't care for anything on two legs that was taller than it. “Going to shoot that one?” Harris asked.

  “Yes. Be ready if my charge doesn't bring it down,” Audubon said. Point-blank buckshot should do the job. Sometimes, though, wild creatures were amazingly tenacious of life.

  Audubon raised the shotgun. No, the agile honker had no idea what it was. This hardly seemed sporting, but his art and science both required it. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked against his shoulder. The male let out a last surprised honk and toppled. The rest of the birds ran off—faster than a man, probably as fast as a horse, gabbling as they went.

  Harris came up beside Audubon. “He's down. He won't get up again, either."

  “No.” Audubon wasn't proud of what he'd done. “And the other male can have all the females now."

  “He ought to thank you, eh?” Harris leered and poked Audubon in the ribs.

  “He'd best enjoy them while he can.” Audubon stayed somber. “Sooner or later—probably sooner—someone else will come along and shoot him, too, and his lady friends with him."

  By then, the rest of the honkers had gone perhaps a hundred yards. When no more unexpected thunder boomed, they settled down and started grazing again. A few minutes later, a hawk soared by overhead—not a red-crested eagle, but an ordinary hawk far too small to harm them. Still, its shadow panicked them more thoroughly than the shotgun blast had. They sprinted for the cover of the trees, honking louder than they did when Audubon fired.

  “Would you please bring my wires, Edward?” the artist asked. “No posing board with a bird this size, but I can truss him up into lifelike postures."

  “I'll be back directly,” Harris said. He took longer than he promised, but only because instead of carrying things himself he led up the pack horses. That gave Audubon not only the wires but also his watercolors and the strong spirits for preserving bits of the agile honker. If he and Harris did what he'd told the customs man they wouldn't do and drank some of the spirits instead of using them all as preservatives ... Well, how else could they celebrate?

  Audubon soon got to work. “This may be the last painting I ever do,” he said. “If it is, I want to give my best."

  “Don't be foolish. You're good for another twenty years, easy,” Harris said.

  “I hope you're right.” Audubon left it there. No matter what he hoped, he didn't believe it, however much he wished he did. He went on, “And this may be the last view of these honkers science ever gets. I owe it to them to give my best, too."

  He wired the dead male's neck and wings into the pose it took when challenging its rival. He had the sketches he'd made from life to help him do that. His heart pounded as he and Harris manhandled the honker. Ten years earlier, or even five, it wouldn't have seemed so hard. No, he didn't think he had twenty more left, or anything close to that.

  Live for the moment, then, he told himself. It's all there is. His eye still saw; his hand still obeyed. If the rest of him was wearing out like a steamboat that had gone up and down the Big Muddy too many times ... then it was. When people remembered him, it would be for what his eye saw and his hand did. The rest? The rest mattered only to him.

  And when people remembered agile honkers from now on, that too would be for what his eye saw and what his hand did. Even more than he had with the red-crested eagle, he felt responsibility's weight heavy on his shoulders.

  The other honkers came out from the trees and began grazing again. Some of them drew close to where he worked. Their calls when they saw him by the male's body seemed to his ear curious and plaintive. They knew their fellow was dead, but they couldn't understand why Audubon stood near the corpse. Unlike a hawk's shadow, he was no danger they recognized.

  The Sun was setting when he looked up from his work. “I think it may do,” he said. “The background will wait for later."

  Harris examined the honker on the paper, the honker vibrant with the life Audubon had stolen from its model. He set a hand on the painter's shoulder. “Congratulations. This one will last forever."

  “Which is more than I will. Which is more than the birds will.” Audubon looked down at the dead honker, agile no more. “Now for th
e anatomical specimens, and now for the dark meat. Poor thing, it will be all flyblown by this time tomorrow."

  “But your painting will keep it alive,” Harris said.

  “My painting will keep its memory alive. It's not the same.” Audubon thought again about how his heart had beat too hard, beat too fast. It was quieter now, but another twenty years? Not likely. “No, it's not the same.” He sighed. “But it's all we have. A great pity, but it is.” He drew his skinning knife. “And now for the rest of the job..."

  Copyright (c) 2005 Harry Turtledove

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  * * *

  Do Neanderthals Know?

  by Robert J. Howe

  We already know that information can be hidden is surprising places. And those who find the keys ...

  I was there when Pinky Sills became a proteus. Maybe not at the exact moment—perhaps even Pinky couldn't say when that was—but I was there at the beginning.

  We were eating lunch in the fifth floor cafeteria of Ihinger-Ibex's Minnesota campus. It was April, but there was still enough winter in the air to keep us from venturing outside the corporate park. It was our regular threesome for lunch: me, Pinky, and Joyce Gannet, my wife and boss of the Composite Materials Group. We were sitting in the open section of the cafeteria, even though we all had executive-level badges and could have used the dining room with the suits, when Pinky pulled out a plastic zip-lock bag full of lettuce and set it on the table.

  Joy and I looked at each other—Pinky was like a lot of geniuses in that he was developmentally arrested at about age eight, and he often did things to get a rise out of us. Pinky took a couple of leaves out of the baggie and placed them neatly between his hamburger patty and bun.

  “Tell me,” Joy said, “tell me that you're not brown-bagging your own lettuce."

  “Nuh-huh,” he said. “It's from the lab. It's an African plant, Brassica; cabbage family. We're looking at it as an anti-fungal. He took a tidy bite from the burger and chewed it carefully. “Tastes neat."

  Joy took a leaf from the baggie and sniffed it.

  “Try some, it's fresh,” Pinky said, his mouth full of food.

  Joy broke off two pieces and handed me one. The leaves were crisp, with a slight bitterness about them. At least they had a taste, which was more than I could say for the bland iceberg salads the cafeteria usually served.

  “It also seems to be a mild hallucinogen,” Pinky offered.

  “What?” I spit out the remainder into my napkin. “Lunatic."

  “Oh, stop,” he said. “I wouldn't let you eat anything that I hadn't tried myself. You probably wouldn't notice anything unless I mentioned it. The only thing is that I had really vivid daydreams after I ate it."

  “Have you tried this out on anyone else?” Joy wanted to know. She looked like she was trying not to laugh.

  “Herman, you know him,” Pinky gestured to me, “from FDA applications? He ate a bunch of it one day—he's on that diet, you know, and he'd eat ratshit on toast—he polished off a small bag of it."

  “Anything happen to him?” I asked, trying to not be annoyed with Pinky.

  “No, I told you. He made a salad out of it with some tomatoes Marybeth had in the break room. Never noticed a thing,” Pinky said.

  “All you guys in pharmaceuticals are head cases,” Joy said. “Too much product testing, I think.” She loaded her empty wrappers and juice container onto her tray. “Well, I've got a one o'clock meeting. And I'm going to call you first if I notice any of the guys turning into lizards or anything,” she said to Pinky.

  “How would you notice?"

  “Yeah, well, there's that.” She gave me an affectionate bump with her hip as she left the table. “See you in the parking lot. Don't let Doctor Strangelove feed you any more mutant lettuce,” she said to me.

  “Mutant cabbage,” Pinky called after her.

  She shook her head and was gone through the swinging doors.

  Pinky's lab was down the corridor from mine on the third floor, and on our way back we engaged in a little character assassination—something we couldn't do in front of Joy, as she was a firm believer in “if you can't say something nice, you're not trying very hard” school of thought. That was easy for her: she had the kind of effortless popularity most of us geeks envied. She didn't have to play office politics, at least not very much, because she was brilliant and well-liked. I also happened to think she was beautiful, but that's neither here nor there. To this day I do not know what the hell she saw in me.

  I was about to leave Pinky outside his lab when he grabbed my arm and pulled me off to one side of the corridor. “Sam, do you ever wonder what it would have been like to live in the ocean like the first bony fish? I was thinking about that,” he said. “What the sea would sound like—feeling the pull of the tides in your body...."

  The expression on my face must have been priceless, because he didn't continue.

  “What brought that on?” I said.

  “I don't know. I was looking at the carpet and it just popped into my head,” he answered. He was sort of frowning and looking off into the middle distance. “Don't you ever get a wild hair, Sam?"

  I just looked at him.

  “Anyway, I do."

  “Uh-huh. Well, I've got to get back to the bench,” I said. I gave him a light poke in the chest. “And keep away from the lettuce.” I meant it as a joke, or I thought I did, but it just kind of hung there between us for a minute.

  “It's cabbage,” he said, finally. He didn't sound as if he were joking, either.

  * * * *

  Joy was already at the car when I got there, sitting in the driver's seat, reading a paperback. I told her about my conversation with Pinky, which she listened to while we waited behind a line of cars leaving the campus.

  “You think his spaciness has something to do with the cabbage at lunch?” she finally said.

  “I don't know. It might. He's drafty enough as it is,” I said. “I guess what worries me is that he's so cavalier about it."

  She nodded. “I suppose,” she said. “On the other hand, if he was going to be sampling the wares, I imagine he could lay his hands on much more potent stuff than cabbage."

  I made a noncommittal grunt. The truth was, any of us at the mid to top levels of pharma research had access to lots of powerful psychogenic drugs, none of which I'd ever had the slightest reason to suspect Pinky of eating. I was still brooding when I realized that we weren't headed the usual way home.

  “Where are we going?"

  “Celebrating,” Joy said, smiling at the windshield.

  “Big ‘C’ or little ‘C'?"

  “Uh, medium. Maybe capital ‘C.’ I've been working on a carbon laminate—I don't know if I talked about it... ?"

  “In passing,” I said. “I thought the group was stalled on it."

  “Right,” she said. “In fact, Phil had already suggested we drop it for the time being. Anyway, I was sitting in the material safety meeting, kind of listening with half an ear, and I think I came up with a way around the heat curing, which is what had us dead in the water."

  “And this means?"

  “Well, it means Phil will be happy with us—we already sank a lot of hours into it—but I'm pretty pleased about it just because,” she said. “You know."

  I knew. Joy did crosswords in pen—nothing rare about that in the circles we traveled in—but on the rare occasion when she couldn't finish one, she neatly clipped it and filed it away to be done later. Not, mind you, after she'd seen the solution: She periodically went to her files and pulled a puzzle at random, working it until she solved it or stalled again, in which case it went back in her files. Joy dropped a line of research about as cheerfully as a pit bull relinquished steak to a poodle.

  We discussed her breakthrough over beer and steaks at our traditional birthday, anniversary, just-need-to-get-out restaurant. Half the fun of being married to someone in the research business was getting to brag about our little victories
to someone who understood what it meant and who was entirely sympathetic, and our fields were different enough to preclude direct competition.

  “You know what's funny?” she said while we were waiting for the coffee. “The solution just popped into my head while I was sitting there. I was thinking about heat curing, and the whole Stanford thing just came out of nowhere."

  “That's always the way it is for me,” I said. “I'm either straining too hard for the answer, or it's something obvious that I've overlooked. Once I relax a little—"

  “Negatrons,” she said, all of a sudden concentrating. “You know, the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that I never heard of the Stanford process. I mean, I looked it up in the cookbook once the method occurred to me, but I don't think I ever came across it before."

  “You might have seen the method without ever hearing the name,” I said. “When you're working on something like this you're always dredging up half-remembered stuff."

  “No. I don't have words to describe it; the whole thing popped into my head fully formed—like I suddenly knew just what I needed to know."

  Coffee arrived then, and New York cheesecake, which commanded our undivided attention. We didn't come back to the conversation until weeks later.

  * * * *

  The next month was a busy one for me. We were in secondary trials for an antiviral drug, a big deal for obvious reasons. Phil Nguyen, the VP for new products, was pushing hard for favorable results. Not that Phil would actually come out and say that the results should be favorable—he'd come up the research route himself, and he knew how we'd react to that—but there were plenty of subtle ways to apply the pressure that netted the same effect. During the crunch, Joy and I often took two cars, as I was getting in early and staying late.

  I also saw little of Pinky, though he and Joy were still having lunch fairly often. It was after one of those lunches that Joy came up to my lab—something she rarely did, and almost never unannounced. I remember the expression on her face when I saw her from across the room—my first thought was that there'd been a death in her family or mine.