— I don’t have a choice, do I? I have to try something. I can’t lose him like this, so senselessly. I’ll try anything … anything to get him back. Ian, Ian, do you hear me? Please come back, please. I’m your mother. You have a family and a life here with us, a God-given life. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?
— Please, Mrs. Lang, come away now. He can’t hear you, or if he does, the words mean nothing to him; they’re no different than any other words streaming through his head. It’s time for us to start his first treatment.
— Doctor, Ian told me that the digitalia was harmless. He said it was nothing more than a tattoo, a tattoo in his cerebellum. Jesus. God. All his friends were getting it done. Why shouldn’t he?
This is what you know:
Stars. Black stars dancing the bumblebee polka—stinging multiplying, imploding inside your brain, hot honey drip drip dripping down your spine. Leather straps. Cool smooth taste of airy neural electricity. Every hair follicle whispers sweet nothings in your skull. Subtle weight of iron and blood in your mouth. Is that water leaking from your eyes, or whalebones, or tailbones, or baseballs, or mothballs, or dictionaries, or pictionaries, or barbed wire, or haywire? Hard rock music makes termites chew through wood at twice their usual speed. A sneeze can travel as fast as one hundred miles per hour. Point three percent of all road accidents in Canada involve a moose. Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his baseball cap to keep his head cool. On the wall, a clock reads 4:20 AM or PM. In the movie Pulp Fiction, all the clocks remain frozen on 4:20. 4:20. 4:20. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on that wall?
Forever.
Pinprick … pinprick … kiss … kiss … kiss ….
This is what you hear:
— Ian, it’s me, your mamma.
This is what matters:
A raindrop falls at approximately seven miles per hour. South Bend, Indiana, 1924, a monkey is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to pay a twenty-five dollar fine for smoking a cigarette. “False Dragonhead” is a wildflower, a member of the mint family, indigenous to the riverbanks and thickets of Minnesota, Quebec, and the mountains of North Carolina; when its flowers are pushed right or left, they stay that way; common nickname: obedient flower.
Dear Abbey
Terry Bisson
Here’s a breathtaking tour, lyrical and sad, from our troubled present all the way to The End of Time, with stops along the way to consider the question of whether or not there’s going to be a future for humanity—or if there should be.
Terry Bisson is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels such as Fire on the Mountain, Wyrldmaker, the popular Talking Man (which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 1986), Voyage to the Red Planet, Pirates of the Universe, The Pickup Artist, and, in a posthumous collaboration with Walter M. Miller, Jr., a sequel to Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz called Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. He is a frequent contributor to such markets as Sci Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Omni, Playboy, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and, in 1991, his famous story “Bears Discover Fire” won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the Asimov’s Reader’s Award, the only story ever to sweep them all. In 2000, he won a Nebula Award for his story “macs.” His short work has been assembled in the collections Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories and In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories. His stories have appeared in our Eighth, Tenth, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.
1-
Lee and I were never really friends, and never is saying a lot if you are covering all the way from late October to the End of Time. We were office mates, initially; colleagues, as it turned out; comrades, if you insist. And traveling companions, to be sure.
If it seems odd to you that a Distinguished Professor of Higher Mathematics should share an office with an American Studies Associate, you have never worked at a community college; much less Southwest Connecticut Community College, which is, due in small part to its central location on the BosWash Corridor, and in no small part to its liberal hiring policies, a brief and unceremonious stop for eastern seaboard academics on their way down, or out, or both. Lee had brought his exalted title with him from MIT, from which he had decamped after an undisclosed (and, as it turned out, almost entirely diversionary) conflict with a department head. But hey, we all have our little secrets. I, on the other hand, like most of my other colleagues at “Swick” (as we called it on the rare occasions when we spoke among ourselves), had been hired sight unseen, no-questions-asked, to fulfill some obscure bureaucratic quota, and could count on being let go when I came up for review in a year or so.
Not that I frankly my dear gave a damn. I was only passing through.
But enough about me. Did I mention that Lee was Chinese? Sixtyish, which meant old enough to be my father (if you could imagine my old man with a doctorate, or even imagine my old man, but that’s another story) and a political refugee from mainland China, which could mean, or so I then thought, anything.
Lee was somewhat of a campus celeb since at MIT he had been shortlisted for a Ballantine (the math MacArthur). His post-post doc from Rice had apparently carried no language requirement, since he spoke a coarse pidgin with a brutal and bizarre Texas drawl. It was as if he had learned English from a “You Know You’re a Redneck If” phrase book.
A shared office at SWCCC meant one desk, one chair, one TI line; the two of us weren’t supposed to be in the office at the same time. It was a timeshare, which is ironic, I suppose, considering. We each had our own shallow drawer. I kept a pint of bourbon and a few books in mine. Lee kept—who knew?—a Time Machine in his.
The day it all began was a Friday—the last day of classes before the long holiday weekend, when the “Swick” campus was due to become even quieter and deader than usual.
Since when did Halloween become a college holiday? As much as I hated teaching, I hated holidays even worse. Especially this coming weekend. I had promised to stay away from the apartment while Helen picked up her stuff, mainly the extra uniforms and the little wheeled bag that fit perfectly through the carry-on templates. It was, like her underwear, and indeed her personality, a pricey and initially fetching example of minimal design. And there was, of course, her little dog. But enough about her. I finished my last class (Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives; of which two-thirds had escaped on that underground railway that spirits students away before holidays) and stopped by the office to have a drink and puzzle out a way to kill the evening. No big deal. Welcome to Moviefone.
When I opened the office door and saw a pair of cowboy boots on the desk, my heart skipped, as they say, a beat. Did Connecticut, like New Jersey, have sheriffs? (Turns out it does but they are not Chinese.) But it was nothing so serious. It was only my rarely seen office mate, Won “Bill” Lee, leaning back, reading, a paper cup in one hand and a book in the other.
“Dr. Cole!” Lee said, sitting up and spilling the contents of the paper cup down the front of his never-iron (and never-really-white) white shirt with its plastic pocket protector filled with pens. I could tell by the smell it was my Jack Daniels. “Lay in wait!”
The book was mine too: The Monkey Wrench Gang.
“Just Cole is okay,” I said. “But hey, Lee, keep your seat. I’m only passing through. What are you doing here this late on a Friday afternoon, anyway?” I reached for the phone, but while I was dialing 777-FILM, Lee cut me off with one finger.
“Lay in wait,” Lee said again, standing up. “You and me, pardner.”
“Me? What can I do for you?”
“Like the good book says,” Lee said mysteriously. He replaced the book and the bottle in my drawer and pulled a PalmPC out of his own. Then he grinned, suddenly and rather incongruously, and pointed toward the door. “Round on the house? Wet the whistle? Happy Hour?”
I figured, Why not? Halloween comes only once a year. Thank God.
Lee was small, even for a Chinaman, with black hair that managed to look short and uncut at the same time. He wore a hideous L.L. Bean safari jacket over his no-iron shirt and pen protector. And shoes, you don’t want to know. Since the campus was, quite literally, in the Middle of Nowhere, and I had no car (don’t believe in them: which was only one of Helen’s well-documented complaints), we rode in Lee’s rather surprising Prius to a little place a block from the Sound called, ominously, it seems in retrospect, the Pequod. “Two Jack,” Lee said, and two amber shots of B Grade bourbon appeared on the bar.
I am always amazed that foreigners think Jack Daniels is an A bourbon. I drink it strictly in honor of my Tennessee grandmother. But what the hell, it seemed as good a way as any to kill an evening. “Cheers,” I said, raising my glass. “To Chinese-American friendship.”
“China-merica no-no,” Lee said, shaking his head with a sudden seriousness. Then he smiled, like an actor changing moods. “Dear Abbey yes! Monkey Ranch Gang yes!”
Dear Abbey? I was startled, suspicious even. But no, no way—I decided to let it go. “It’s ‘Wrench,’” I said, draining my glass and signaling for another. “But why not? Here’s to old Ed Abbey.”
Lee smiled and toasted back. Then he winked. “To the Jersey Kaczynski.”
“Whoa!” I looked around. We were alone in the bar except for a couple in the far back, by the jukebox. “Where’d you hear that?”
Though it was no secret how I had lost my position at Princeton, I hadn’t exactly advertised it at Swick. It had been almost five years before. I had done eleven months for refusing to testify about the firebombing of some ski lifts in the Poconos, with collateral damage. No direct connection had been proven, or even officially alleged. Since then I had, rather strategically, distanced myself from the environmental movement.
“Pell,” said Lee. “Smell the beans. No problem.”
“Spill the beans,” I said. “And it is a problem because this Pell should learn to mind his own business and keep his mouth shut. I didn’t know you ran with that crowd anyway.”
Which was true. If Lee was Green, this was the first I had heard of it. The Greens (at Swick, anyway) tended to be all white and ostentatiously boho, neither of which fit Lee’s profile; or, for that matter, my own.
But I felt (as usual) compelled to say more. “The Jersey Kaczynski thing was all bullshit anyway. I had no connection with EarthAlert or with the individuals who were later captured. I happened to be an easy target because I had assigned Kaczynski’s “Unabomber Manifesto” in an American Studies class. The feds came after me because they were too stupid or too lazy to find the individuals they actually wanted.”
Not exactly true but close enough for the Pequod.
“They needn’t have bothered anyway,” I said, getting wound up in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that Lee could barely understand me. Or so I thought. “The environmental movement is a joke. It’s way too late for talk. Peat fires in the arctic tundra. In Africa, the elephants are dying in heaps. The sea level is expected to rise two to four feet in the next hundred years. Do you have any idea what that means?”
“Every any idea,” said Lee, nodding. “Lamentation river stage flood.” What that meant, he explained, and I pieced together, as we shared another round and I began to understand Lee’s fractured Texas English, was that China’s infamous Yellow River Dam project had reached reservoir level one week before, inundating the last of the ancient, doomed villages. Either Lee’s English or my understanding, or both, got better with the whiskey, and I learned that Lee had worked as an engineer on the project for eleven years before comprehending what a disaster it would be. He had then opposed it publicly and clandestinely for two years before being forced to leave the country just two steps ahead of the secret police.
“Bare excape,” he said with an enigmatic smile, effortlessly nailing the authentic Texas pronunciation. I looked at my colleague with new respect. Eleven months in Allenwood Federal Correctional Facility was a piece of cake compared to what they do to you in China, if they catch you. And I had been lecturing him!
“So here’s to Ted,” I said. I didn’t bother to whisper. Except for the two in the far back, by the jukebox, Lee and I were the only people in the Pequod besides the bartender, a mournful Connecticut Yankee who politely kept his distance while he wiped glasses and watched the “news” on TV, as if the routine murders of inner-city drug dealers were news.
“Ted?” Lee asked, raising his tiny glass.
“Ted Kaczynski. Because the crazy fucker’s right, unfuckingfortunately,” I explained, signaling for another round. “Because we’re in the middle of what E. O. Wilson calls the Sixth Extinction. Because the ongoing, relentless, merciless, and mindless destruction of the planet overrules whatever small progress might have been made against racism, nationalism, greed, or ignorance or all of the above. Because they can’t even make a fucking gesture of a deal to stop global warming; because they deny it’s even happening; because —”
“So why not Pell? Why not Greens?”
“Because, Lee, what’s Texan for a day late and a dollar short?”
“Why not Monkey Ranch, then, Cole? Why not Dear Abbey indeed?”
“Whoa!” I said, aloud this time. There it was, Dear Abbey, again. This time it was no mistake. It was deliberate. I could tell by Lee’s suddenly inscrutable smile.
Some kind of cop: that was my first thought. I set down my empty glass. “I beg your fucking pardon. What in the world are you talking about?”
“What he’s talking about is what we’ve all been talking about for the past two and a half years,” said a familiar voice from the back of the bar, by the jukebox.
I was suddenly sober, or so it seemed to me. My heart, or what I have been told passes for a heart, was pounding as I turned and faced the two who were walking toward me out of the shadows in the back of the bar. One was Pell, of course, I should have guessed; and right behind Pell was my most valued, most troublesome, and least expected friend.
Justine?
There’s always a problem when you run into somebody who’s underground, especially when they’re with someone. Even when it’s clearly not an accident, what do you call them? What do they call them? Who knows who and who knows what? Adding to the confusion, there’s never any time to think.
“Justine?”
“Actually, it’s Flo these days,” she said. “Don’t I get a hug?”
“Of course,” I said, complying, “but what the hell are you doing here? And with —”
There was no way to cast a look toward Pell without seeming rude. I cast a look toward Pell.
Pell smiled and nodded. Smug? Stupid? Both. He went and stood beside Lee at the bar but didn’t, I noticed, order a drink. Of course not. He was on duty.
So was Justine, or rather, Flo. If you’re looking for a description, you won’t find it here. You probably don’t need it. She looked exactly the same as she had looked on America’s Most Wanted, except for the hair color. Six million people saw that, thanks to the two teenagers, both boys, who had broken into the Skyline Lodge looking for cell phones to steal.
Teenagers usually kill themselves and one another. They don’t ordinarily depend on environmentalists to do it, even as collateral damage. But I digress …
“Good to see you, Cole,” she said, checking to make sure the bartender was out of earshot. “Though this isn’t exactly a social call.”
“Why am I not surprised,” I said. “Good to see you too. I hope things are going okay. I haven’t heard much. That’s good in itself, I guess.”
“That’s good,” she confirmed. “Things have been quiet. We’ve been laying low. Laying off the ‘stupid stunts.’ I’m quoting you here, Cole. I knew you would approve. Bartender?!”
“Thought this wasn’t a social call.”
“It’s not but don’t worry. The bourbon is part of the deal, believe it or not. I wanted to introduce you to Dr. Lee, and this seemed the easiest way.”
“Introduce? He’s my office mate.”
“Yes, quite a coincidence, n’est-ce pas? I meant introduce politically. You are also comrades, as you have been discovering.”
“Quit beating around the bush, Justine. What does he know about Dear Abbey? Is that why we’re here?”
“It’s Flo. And yes, my friend and comrade, yes it is.”
By now either you know, and everyone knows, or you don’t, and it doesn’t matter any more, that Dear Abbey is a radical, long-range plan for saving the environment that will make Ted Kaczynski look like Mother Teresa. It involves an alarmingly complex but theoretically possible piece of genetic engineering that will, let us say, severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the environment. Severe is the operative modifier. You can’t call it terrorism because no one will be killed, directly at least, and no one even know for sure what is happening until it has been operating for almost a decade, by which time it will be too late to undo it. The human cost will be high but not nearly as high as the cost of doing nothing, or of simply continuing with the kind of pointless stunts for which the environmental movement is known.
Dear Abbey was the only thing that still connected me to EarthAlert. I hadn’t come up with the idea but I had been among the first to embrace it and argue for it. I had lost interest only when it became clear that it couldn’t be accomplished any time soon; the technology was still decades away. As far as I was concerned, these were decades the world didn’t have.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 102