Each holotank held two whorls of shifting colors, the outlines clearer and the textures more sharply delineated than any previous holographs in the history of science. Keith’s and Devrie’s perceptions of each other’s presence. The whorls went on clarifying themselves, separating into distinct and mappable layers, as on the platform Keith and Devrie remained frozen, all their energies focused on the telepathic trance. Seconds passed, and then minutes. And still, despite the clarity of the holographs in the tank, a clarity that fifteen years earlier I would have given my right hand for, I sensed that Keith and Devrie were holding back, were deliberately confining their unimaginable perceptiveness to each other’s radiant energy, in the same way that water is confined behind a dam to build power.
But how could I be sensing that? From a subliminal “reading” of the mapped perceptions in the holotanks? Or from something else?
More minutes passed. Keith and Devrie stayed frozen, facing each other, and over her skeletal body and his stronger one a flush began to spread, rosy and slow, like heat tide rising.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said one of the medical doctors, so low that only I, standing directly behind her, could have heard. It was not a curse, nor a prayer, but some third possibility, unnameable.
Keith put one hand on Devrie’s thigh. She shuddered. He drew her down to the cushions on the platform and they began to caress each other, not frenzied, not in the exploring way of lovers but with a deliberation I have never experienced outside a research lab, a slow care that implied that worlds of interpretation hung on each movement. Yet the effect was not of coldness nor detachment but of intense involvement, of tremendous energy joyously used, of creating each other’s bodies right then, there under each other’s hands. They were working, and oblivious to all but their work. But if it was a kind of creative work, it was also a kind of primal innocent eroticism, and, watching, I felt my own heat begin to rise. “Innocent”—but if innocence is unknowingness, there was nothing innocent about it at all. Keith and Devrie knew and controlled each heartbeat, and I felt the exact moment when they let their sexual energies, added to all the other neural energies, burst the dam and flood outward in wave after wave, expanding the scope of each brain’s perceptions, inundating the artificially-walled world.
A third whorl formed in holotank.
It formed suddenly: one second nothing, the next brightness. But then it wavered, faded a bit. After a few moments it brightened slightly, a diffused gloden haze, before again fading. On the platform Keith gasped, and I guessed he was having to shift his attention between perceiving the third source of radiation and keeping up the erotic version of the twin trance. His biofeedback techniques were less experienced than Devrie’s, and the male erection more fragile. But then he caught the rhythm, and the holograph brightened.
It seemed to me that the room brightened as well, although no additional lights came on and the consoles glowed no brighter. Sweat poured off the researchers. Bohentin leaned forward, his neck muscle tautening toward the platform as if it were his will and not Keith/Devrie’s that strained to perceive that third presence recorded in the tank. I thought, stupidly, of mythical intermediaries: Merlyn never made king, Moses never reaching the Promised Land. Intermediaries—and then it became impossible to think of anything at all.
Devrie shuddered and cried out. Keith’s orgasm came a moment later, and with it a final roil of neural activity so strong the two primary whorls in each holotank swelled to fill the tank and inundate the third. At the moment of breakthrough Keith screamed, and in memory it seems as if the scream was what tore through the last curtain—that is nonsense. How loud would microbes have to scream to attract the attention of giants? How loud does a knock on the door have to be to pull a sleeper from the alien world of dreams?
The doctor beside me fell to her knees. The third presence—or some part of it—swirled all around us, racing along our own unprepared synapses and neurons, and what swirled and raced was astonishment. A golden, majestic astonishment. We had finally attracted Its attention, finally knocked with enough neural force to be just barely heard—and It was astonished that we could, or did exist. The slow rise of that powerful astonishment within the shielded lab was like the slow swinging around of the head of a great beast to regard some butterfly it has barely glimsped from the corner of one eye. But this was no beast. As Its attention swung toward us, pain exploded in my skull—the pain of sound too loud, lights too bright, charge too high. My brain was burning on overload. There came one more flash of insight—wordless, pattern without end—and the sound of screaming. Then, abruptly, the energy vanished.
Bohentin, on all fours, crawled toward the holotanks. The doctor lay slumped on the floor; the other doctor had already reached the platform and its two crumpled figures. Someone was crying, someone else shouting. I rose, fell, dragged myself to the side of the platform and then could not climb it. I could not climb the platform. Hanging with two hands on the edge, hearing the voice crying as my own, I watched the doctor bend shakily to Keith, roll him off Devrie to bend over her, turn back to Keith.
Bohentin cried, “The tapes are intact!”
“Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God,” sornone moaned, until abruptly she stopped. I grasped the flesh-colored padding on top of the platform and pulled my-self up onto it.
Devrie lay unconscious, pulse erratic, face cast in perfect bliss. The doctor breathed into Keith’s mouth—what strength could the doctor himself have left?—and pushed on the naked chest. Breathe, push, breathe, push. The whole length of Keith’s body shuddered; the doctor rocked back on his heels; Keith breathed.
“It’s all on tape!” Bohentin cried. “It’s all on tapel”
“God damn you to hell,” I whispered to Devrie’s blissful face. “It didn’t even know we were there!”
Her eyes opened. I had to lean close to hear her answer.
“But now … we know He … is there.”
She was too weak to smile. I looked away from her, away from that face, out into the tumultuous emptiness of the lab, anywhere.
They will try again.
Devrie has been asleep, fed by glucose solution through an IV, for fourteen hours. I sit near her bed, frowned at by the nurse, who can see my expression as I stare at my sister. Somewhere in another bed Keith is sleeping yet again. His rest is more fitful than Devrie’s; she sinks into sleep as into warm water, but he cannot. Like me, he is afraid of drowning.
An hour ago he came into Devrie’s room and grasped my hand. “How could It—He—It not have been aware that we existed? Not even have known?”
I didn’t answer him.
“You felt it too, Seena, didn’t you? The others say they could, so you must have too. It … created us in some way. No, that’s wrong. How could It create us and not know?”
I said wearily, “Do we always know what we’ve created?” and Keith glanced at me sharply. But I had not been referring to my father’s work in cloning.
“Keith. What’s a Thysania Africana?”
“A what?”
“Think of us,” I said, “as just one more biological side-effect. One type of being acts, and another type of being comes into existence. Man stages something like the African Horror, and in doing so he creates whole new species of moths and doesn’t even discover they exist until long afterward. If man can do it, why not God? And why should He be any more aware of it than we are?”
Keith didn’t like that. He scowled at me, and then looked at Devrie’s sleeping face: Devrie’s sleeping bliss.
“Because she is a fool,” I said savagely, “and so are you. You won’t leave it alone, will you? Having been noticed by It once, you’ll try to be noticed by It again. Even though she promised me otherwise, and even if it kills you both.”
Keith looked at me a long time, seeing clearly—finally—the nature of the abyss between us, and its dimensions. But I already knew neither of us could cross. When at last he spoke, his voice held so much compassion that I hated him. “Se
ena. Seena, love. There’s no more doubt now, don’t you see? Now rational belief is no harder than rational doubt. Why are you so afraid to even believe?”
I left the room. In the corridor I leaned against the wall, palms spread flat against the tile, and closed my eyes. It seemed to me that I could hear wings, pale and fragile, beating against glass.
They will try again. For the sake of sure knowledge that the universe is not empty, Keith and Devrie and all the others like their type of being will go on pushing their human brains beyond what the human brain has evolved to do, go on fluttering their wings against that biological window. For the sake of sure knowledge: belief founded on experiment and not on faith. And the Other: being/alien/God? It, too, may choose to initiate contact, if It can and now that It knows we are here. Perhaps It will seek to know us, and even beyond the laboratory Devrie and Keith may find any moment of heightened arousal subtly invaded by a shadowy Third. Will they sense It, hovering just beyond consciousness, if they argue fiercely or race a sailboat in rough water or make love? How much arousal will it take, now, for them to sense those huge wings beating on the other side of the window?
And windows can be broken.
Tomorrow I will fly back to New York. To my museum, to my exhibits, to my moths under permaplex, to my empty apartment, where I will keep the heavy drapes drawn tightly across the glass.
For—oh God—all the rest of my life.
Flying saucer Rock and Roll
* * *
HOWARD WALDROP
Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections: Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and Going Home Again. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moon World. His most recent books are the print version of his collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (formerly available only in downloadable form on-line), the chapbook A Better World’s in Birth!, and a collection of his stories written in collaboration with various other authors, Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations. His stories have appeared in our First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Twelfth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Twenty-first annual collections. Having lived in Washington state for a number of years, Waldrop recently moved back to his former hometown of Austin, Texas, something which caused celebrations and loud hurrahs to rise up from the rest of the population.
In the classic story that follows, one which has assumed cult favorite status over the years, he brings together flying saucers and a rock and roll band—with some rather startling results.
They could have been contenders.
Talk about Danny and the Juniors, talk about the Spaniels, the Contours, Sonny Till and the Orioles. They made it to the big time: records, tours, sock hops at $500 a night. Fame and glory.
But you never heard of the Kool-Tones, because they achieved their apotheosis and their apocalypse on the same night, and then they broke up. Some still talk about that night, but so much happened, the Kool-Tones get lost in the shuffle. And who’s going to believe a bunch of kids, anyway? The cops didn’t and their parents didn’t. It was only two years after the president had been shot in Dallas, and people were still scared. This, then, is the Kool-Tones’ story:
Leroy was smoking a cigar through a hole he’d cut in a pair of thick, red wax lips. Slim and Zoot were tooting away on Wowee whistles. It was a week after Halloween, and their pockets were still full of trick-or-treat candy they’d muscled off little kids in the projects. Ray, slim and nervous, was hanging back, “We shouldn’t be here, you know? I mean, this ain’t the Hellbenders’ territory, you know? I don’t know whose it is, but, like, Vinnie and the guys don’t come this far.” He looked around.
Zoot, who was white and had the beginnings of a mustache, took the yellow wax-candy kazoo from his mouth. He bit off and chewed up the big C pipe. “I mean, if you’re scared, Ray, you can go back home, you know?”
“Nah!” said Leroy. “We need Ray for the middle parts.” Leroy was twelve years old and about four feet tall. He was finishing his fourth cigar of the day. He looked like a small Stymie Beard from the old Our Gang comedies.
He still wore the cut-down coat he’d taken with him when he’d escaped from his foster home.
He was staying with his sister and her boyfriend. In each of his coat pockets he had a bottle: one Coke and one bourbon.
“We’ll be all right,” said Cornelius, who was big as a house and almost eighteen. He was shaped like a big ebony golf tee, narrow legs and waist blooming out to an A-bomb mushroom of arms and chest. He was a yard wide at the shoulders. He looked like he was always wearing football pads.
“That’s right,” said Leroy, taking out the wax lips and wedging the cigar back into the hole in them. “I mean, the kid who found this place didn’t say anything about it being somebody’s spot, man.”
“What’s that?” asked Ray.
They looked up. A small spot of light moved slowly across the sky. It was barely visible, along with a few stars, in the lights from the city.
“Maybe it’s one of them UFOs you’re always talking about, Leroy,” said Zoot.
“Flying saucer, my left ball,” said Cornelius. “That’s Telstar. You ought to read the papers.”
“Like your mama makes you?” asked Slim.
“Aww …,” said Cornelius.
They walked on through the alleys and the dark streets. They all walked like a man.
“This place is Oz,” said Leroy.
“Hey!” yelled Ray, and his voice filled the area, echoed back and forth in the darkness, rose in volume, died away.
“Wow.”
They were on what had been the loading dock of an old freight and storage company. It must have been closed sometime during the Korean War or maybe in the unimaginable eons before World War II. The building took up most of the block, but the loading area on the back was sunken and surrounded by the stone wall they had climbed. If you stood with your back against the one good loading door, the place was a natural amphitheater.
Leroy chugged some Coke, then poured bourbon into the half-empty bottle. They all took a drink, except Cornelius, whose mother was a Foursquare Baptist and could smell liquor on his breath three blocks away,
Cornelius drank only when he was away from home two or three days.
“Okay, Kool-Tones,” said Leroy. “Let’s hit some notes.”
They stood in front of the door, Leroy to the fore, the others behind him in a semicircle: Cornelius, Ray, Slim, and Zoot.
“One, two, three,” said Leroy quietly, his face toward the bright city beyond the surrounding buildings.
He had seen all the movies with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in them and knew the moves backwards. He jumped in the air and came down, and Cornelius hit it: “Bah-doo, bah-doo, bah-doo—uhh.”
It was a bass from the bottom of the ocean, from the Marianas Trench, a voice from Death Valley on a wet night, so far below sea level you could feel the absence of light in your mind. And then Zoot and Ray came in: “Oooh-oooh, ooh-oooh,” with Leroy humming under, and then Slim stepped out and began to lead the tenor part of “Sincerely,” by the Crows. And they went through that one perfectly, flawlessly, the dark night and the dock walls throwing their voices out to the whole breathing city.
“Wow,” said Ray, when they finished, but Leroy held up his hand, and Zoot leaned forward and took a deep breath and sang: “Dee-dee-woo-oo, dee-eee-wooo-oo, dee-uhmm-doo-way.”
And Ray and Slim chanted: “A-weem-wayyy, a-wee,-wayyy.”
And then Leroy, who had a falsetto that could take hair off an opossum, hit the high notes from “The Lion Sleeps Toni
ght,” and it was even better than the first song, and not even the Tokens on their number two hit had ever sounded greater.
Then they started clapping their hands, and at every clap the city seemed to jump with expectation, joining in their dance, and they went through a shaky-legged Skyliners-type routine and into: Hey-ahh-stuh-huh, hey-ahh-stuh-uhh,” of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay,” and when Leroy soared his “Hoh-wahh-yuh?” over Zoot’s singing, they all thought they would die.
And without pause, Ray and Slim started: “Shoo-be-doop, shoo-doop-de-be-doop, shoo-doopbe-do-be-doop,” and Cornelius was going, “Ah-rem-em, ah-rem-em, ah-rememm bah.”
And they went through the Five Satins’ “(I Remember) In the Still of the Night.”
“Hey, wait,” said Ray, as Slim “woo-uh-wooo-uh-woo-ooo-ah-woo-ah”-ed to a finish, “I thought I saw a guy out there.”
“You’re imagining things,” said Zoot. But they all stared out into the dark anyway.
There didn’t seem to be anything there.
“Hey, look,” said Cornelius. “Why don’t we try putting the bass part of ‘Stormy Weather’ with the high part of’Crying in the Chapel’? I tried it the other night, but I can’t—”
“Shit, man!” said Slim. “That ain’t the way it is on the records. You gotta do it like on the records.”
The Best of the Best, Volume 1 Page 15