Bears Discover Fire

by Terry Bisson

  (EPA! So he was a government man.)

  “Well, now, you talk a good game!” Mr. Manning said. “But can you help with our solid-waste disposal crisis? We’re talking heaps of stuff here.”

  “With our new accounting system, you no longer spend precious resources trucking trash all over creation looking for legal landfills,” the Environmental Protection Agency representative (for that was what he was) said. “You pay a one-time pollution penalty fee and pile the shit in a big fucking heap on the poor side of town.”

  “I like that,” said Mr. Manning. “But what about the sticky, stinky stuff? We have oodles of ordure that emit radioactive steam and drool dioxins directly into the groundwater. You’re going to let us dump this anywhere we want?”

  “No, we have a responsibility to protect the public,” said the EPA rep. “The real stinky stuff, you dump it in the woods.”

  “I like that too,” said Mr. Manning. “But what about the endangered species? You wouldn’t believe the grief we get from the environmental do-gooders lately.”

  “Forget them,” said the EPA rep. “If we listened to them, we’d be up to our assholes in owls.”

  “I thought it was eyebrows,” I said.

  “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it,” said Mr. Manning, his prowling paw pausing at the hem of my panties, where his permit ran out. “Just be sure you’re getting all this down.”

  “It’s all covered in the literature I gave you, anyway,” said the EPA agent. “Since there are no endangered species left, the ES fees have been waived. That makes our direct environmental penalty payment plan even more attractive. According to the most conservative figures—”

  While he droned on, I looked out the window. Mr. Manning’s twenty-third-floor office commanded a beautiful view of the river, looking with its gleaming oil slicks like Joseph’s coat of many colors. (I read the Bible every day. Do you?)

  The EPA rep was showing Mr. Manning a four-color picture of a thirty-six-inch pipe. “The beauty of a scientific straight-through system is that it never clogs and rarely backs up,” he said. “The effluents are taxed once only and dumped directly into the river, which runs conveniently into the sea. It’s like a pay toilet.”

  “This guy’s a poet,” mused Mr. Manning, running his hand along the crack that separated my buttocks. I tried to ignore him (jobs are scarce these days) and kept looking out the window. It was a gorgeous day. You could almost see the sky. The radioactive dump across town glowed warmly, reminding me of home. Since the dump was in my neighborhood, the high-geiger penalty pennies (we called it clickety-clink, or mutation money) had provided bonus burial benefits for five of my six children.

  “Plus, it’s all plenty patriotic, since one hundred percent of the environmental penalty money goes directly into the U.S. treasury, and not to some high-tech Jap clean-up scam,” the EPA rep said, winding up his spiel.

  “I like that,” said Mr. Manning.

  I sneaked a glance at my watch. My chronically underemployed husband, Big Bill, would be waiting impatiently for me to get home to cook supper for himself and our last remaining child, the hideously deformed, demented little cripple, Tiny Tim.

  It was 4:59. Mr. Manning and the EPA rep were still working out the details of the quarterly pollution payment plan, which meant I would have to work late, whether I wanted to or not.

  Of course, I would get paid overtime.

  Finally, at 5:59, the papers were signed and I headed home. The stairs were crowded but the elevator was almost empty. Lots of people are afraid to take the elevator, after the terrifying incidents of the past few weeks, but just knowing the inspection certificate is on file in the building superintendent’s office (even if we’re not allowed to see it) is enough for me.

  The expressway was bumper-to-bumper with the big-finned fifties replicas that are popular now that leaded gasoline is available again. It warmed my heart to think of all the ethyl-penalty bucks going into the HEW budget. I knew it was helping to pay for the remedial education of my deranged, learning-dislocated, double-dyslexic little boy, Tiny Tim.

  I drove only half listening to the ads and to Howard Stern, who was back on the air (his station had apparently purchased another obscenity authorization). I was tired and didn’t really feel like listening, so I turned it down as low as it would go, longing for the day Big Bill and I could afford a car without a radio.

  But it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, so I concentrated on the beauty of the many-colored cars crawling through the magenta-tinted air. The carbon penalty fees have certainly eased the tax burden on working wives like me.

  Traffic was slowed almost to a crawl near the airport. At first I feared it was another crash (which can tie up the turnpike for hours) but it was only a set of landing gear that had worked loose and fallen onto the highway. This was happening more and more lately since the Federal Aeronautics Board had started selling maintenance waivers to the airlines to augment the FAB retirement fund.

  I was glad to see the lights of our peaceful suburb, Middle Elm. My pleasure was spoiled a little (but only a little) by the cross burning in the park. It looked like the KKK had purchased another bias license—not as expensive as actual violence permits. The lynching last week must have cost them a pretty penny (if you can use the word “pretty” for such a grim event).

  It was almost nine when I pulled into the drive. I knew I would be in trouble, so I hesitated at the door as long as I could—until I started to gag on the stench from our next-door neighbor’s pigpen. It’s a terrible odor, but what could we do? Mrs. Greene had paid her feces fees, and the money went to lower our property taxes, after all. Plus, her animals were not eaten but tortured to death for science, and I knew that these animal experiments were helping improve the quality of life of my terminally-twisted, pus-encrusted, semi-psychotic son, Tiny Tim.

  Barbara (I will not call her Babs!) was in her doorway, waving a rubber glove, but I didn’t wave back. Not to be snotty, but I hate it when ordinary people take on the airs of giant corporations.

  “Where the hell you been, bitch!” Big Bill muttered. He took another swig of gin (ignoring the label, which said, WARNING, DRINKING MAKES SOME PEOPLE ACT UGLY). He grabbed my ass, and when I pulled away he made a fist like Ralph Cramden (don’t you love that old show?) and pointed not toward the Moon but toward his framed wife-beating authorization certificate hanging on the wall over the dinette table, next to our marriage license.

  Ignoring his antics, I put the chicken in the oven, slamming the door quickly against the smell. I wondered how old it was but there was no way to tell. The expiration date was covered by an official USDA late-penalty override sticker, and it’s against the law to pull them off, like mattress tags.

  Where was Tiny Tim? Just then I heard automatic-weapons fire (everybody has a permit these days) and he burst in the door; or rather, rolled in, his face all bloody and his wheelchair bent out of shape.

  “Where have you been?” I asked. (As if I didn’t know! He’s had to travel through a bad neighborhood lately, ever since the town floated a bond issue to buy a permit allowing them to bypass the handicapped-access laws.)

  “Got mugged,” he said, spitting broken teeth into one clawlike, grasping little hand.

  “Who did it?” said his dad. “I’ll kill them!”

  “They had their papers, Pop!” whined our bruised, battered, blubbering baby boy. “They whipped it out and waved it in my face, and then it was whack whack whack!”

  “Poor kid,” I said, trying not to look at him. Never a pretty child, he looked even worse than usual. Instead, I looked out the window at the sunset. They say sunsets are better now than ever, now that pollution is controlled.

  Certainly they are colorful as all Hell (if you’ll pardon my French)!

  “God damn them every one,” Tiny Tim said, wrinkling what was left of his little button nose. “What’s for supper, chicken again?”

  And that’s the end of my story. I
f you don’t like it, fuck it.

  Please direct any complaints to the New York office of the National Writer’s Union, Plot Department, where my Climax Bypass Permit Number 5944 is on file. Fee paid.

  THE SHADOW KNOWS

  If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it.

  —WITTGENSTEIN

  I

  When it comes to property, even old folks move fast. Edwards hadn’t been abandoned for more than a year before the snowbirds began moving in. We turned the pride of the U.S. space program into a trailer park in six months, with Airstreams and Winneys parked on the slabs that had once held hangars and barracks.

  I was considered sort of the unofficial mayor, since I had served in and out (or up and down, as earthsiders put it) of Edwards for some twenty years before being forced into retirement exactly six days short of ten years before the base itself was budget-cut out of existence by a bankrupt government. I knew where the septic tanks and waterlines had been; I knew where the electrical lines and roads were buried under the blowing sand. And since I had been in maintenance, I knew how to splice up the phone lines and even pirate a little electric from the LA-to-Vegas trunk.

  Though I didn’t know everybody in Slab City, just about everybody knew me.

  So when a bald-headed dude in a two-piece suit started going door to door asking for Captain Bewley, folks knew who he was looking for. “You must mean the Colonel,” they would say. (I had never been very precise about rank.) Everybody knew I had been what the old-timers called an “astronaut,” but nobody knew I had been a lunie, except for a couple of old girlfriends to whom I had shown the kind of tricks you learn in three years at .16g, but that’s another and more, well, intimate story altogether.

  This story, which also has its intimate aspects, starts with a knock at the door of my ancient but not exactly venerable 2009 Road Lord.

  “Captain Bewley, probably you don’t remember me, but I was junior day officer when you were number two on maintenance operations at Houbolt—”

  “On the far side of the Moon. Flight Lieutenant J. B. ‘Here’s Johnny’ Carson. How could I forget one of the most”—I searched for a word: what’s a polite synonym for “forgettable”?—“agreeable young lunies in the Service. No longer quite so young. And now a civilian, I see.”

  “Not exactly, sir,” he said.

  “Not ‘sir’ anymore,” I said. “You would probably outrank me by now, and I’m retired anyway. Just call me Colonel Mayor.”

  He didn’t get the joke—Here’s Johnny never got the joke, unless he was the one making it; he just stood there looking uncomfortable. Then I realized he was anxious to get in out of the UV, and that I was being a poor host.

  “And come on in,” I said. I put aside the radio-controlled model I was building; or rather, fixing, for one of my unofficial grandsons who couldn’t seem to get the hang of landing. I don’t have any grandkids, or kids, of my own. A career in space, or “in the out” as we used to say, has its down side.

  “I see you’ve maintained an interest in flight,” Here’s Johnny said. “That makes my job easier.”

  That was clearly my cue, and since we lunies never saw much use in beating around the bush (there being no bushes on the Moon) I decided to let Here’s Johnny off the hook. Or is that mixing metaphors? There are no metaphors on the Moon, either. Everything there is what it is.

  Anyway, accommodatingly, I said, “Your job, which is—”

  “I’m now working for the UN, Captain Bewley,” he said. “They took over the Service, you know. Even though I’m out of uniform, I’m here on official business. Incognito. To offer you an assignment.”

  “An assignment? At my age? The Service threw me out ten years ago because I was too old!”

  “It’s a temporary assignment,” he said. “A month, two months at most. But it means accepting a new commission, so they can give you clearance, since the whole project is Top Secret.”

  I could hear the caps on the T and the S. I suppose I was supposed to be impressed. I suppose I might have been, fifty years before.

  “They’re talking about a promotion to major, with increased retirement and medical benefits,” said Here’s Johnny.

  “That would be a de facto demotion, since everybody here calls me Colonel already,” I said. “Nothing personal, Here’s Johnny, but you wasted a trip. I already have enough medical and retirement for my old bones. What’s a little extra brass to a seventy-six-year-old with no dependents and few vices?”

  “What about space pay?”

  “Space pay?”

  Here’s Johnny smiled, and I realized he had been beating around the bush the whole time, and enjoying it. “They want to send you back to the Moon, Captain Bewley.”

  In the thrillers of the last century, when you are recruited for a top secret international operation (and this one turned out to be not just international but interplanetary; even interstellar; hell, intergalactic), they send a Learjet with no running lights to pick you up at an unmarked airport and whisk you to an unnamed Caribbean island, where you meet with the well-dressed and ruthless dudes who run the world from behind the scenes.

  In real life, in the 2030s at least, you fly coach to Newark.

  I knew that Here’s Johnny couldn’t tell me what was going on, at least until I had been sworn in, so on the way back East we just shot the bull and caught up on old times. We hadn’t been friends in the Service—there was age and rank and temperament between us—but time has a way of smoothing out those wrinkles. Most of my old friends were dead; most of his were in civilian life, working for one of the French and Indian firms that serviced the network of communications and weather satellites that were the legacy of the last century’s space program. The Service Here’s Johnny and I knew had been cut down to a Coast Guard-type outfit running an orbital rescue shuttle and maintaining the lunar asteroid-watch base I had helped build, Houbolt.

  “I was lucky enough to draw Houbolt,” Here’s Johnny said, “or I would probably have retired myself three years ago, at fifty.”

  I winced. Even the kids were getting old.

  We took a cab straight through the Lincoln/Midtown Tunnel to the UN building in Queens, where I was recommissioned as a major in the Space Service by a bored lady in a magenta uniform. My new papers specified that when I retired again in sixty days I would draw a major’s pension plus augmented medical with a full dental plan.

  This was handsome treatment indeed, since I still had several teeth left. I was impressed; and also puzzled.

  “Okay, Here’s Johnny,” I said as we walked out into the perfect October sunlight (at my age you notice fall more than spring): “Let’s have it. What’s the deal? What’s going on?”

  He handed me a room chit for a midtown hotel (the Service had never been able to afford Queens) and a ticket on the first flight out for Reykjavik the next morning; but he held on to a brown envelope with my name scrawled on it.

  “I have your orders in this envelope,” he said. “They explain everything. The problem is, well—once I give them to you I’m supposed to stay by your side until I put you on the plane tomorrow morning.”

  “And you have a girlfriend.”

  “I figured you might.”

  So I did. An old girlfriend. At my age, all your girlfriends are old.

  New York is supposed to be one of the dirtiest cities in the world; it is certainly the noisiest. Luckily I like noise and, like most old people, need little sleep. Here’s Johnny must have needed more; he was late. He met me at the Icelandic gate at Reagan International only minutes before my flight’s last boarding call and handed me the brown envelope with my name on it.

  “You’re not supposed to open it until you’re on the plane, Captain,” he said. “I mean, Major.”

  “Not so fast,” I said, grabbing his wrist. “You got me into this. You must know something about it.”

  Here’s Johnny lowered his voice and looked from side to side; like most lunies he loved secrets. “You kno
w Zippe-Buisson, the French firm that cleans up orbital trash?” he said. “A few months ago they noticed a new blip in medium high earth. There weren’t any lost sats on the db; it was too big to be a dropped wrench and too small to be a shuttle tank.”

  Ding, went the door. I backed into the gate and held it open with one foot. “Go on,” I said.

  “Remember Voyager, the interstellar probe sent out in the 1970s? It carried a disk with digital maps of Earth and pictures of humans, even music. Mozart and what’s-his-name—”

  Ding ding, went the door. “I remember the joke. ‘Send more Chuck Berry,’” I said. “But you’re changing the subject.”

  No, he wasn’t. Just as the door started to close and I had to jump through, Here’s Johnny called out: “Voyager is back. With a passenger.”

  The sealed orders, which I opened on the plane, didn’t add much to what Here’s Johnny had told me. I was officially assigned to the UN’s SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Commission, E Team, temporarily stationed at Houbolt, Luna. That was interesting, since Houbolt had been cut back to robot operation before my retirement, and hadn’t housed anybody (that I knew of) for almost fifteen years.

  I was to proceed to Reykjavik for my meds; I was to communicate with no one about my destination or my assignment. Period. There was no indication what the E Team was (although I had of course been given a clue), or what my role in it was to be. Or why I had been chosen.

  Reykjavik is supposed to be one of the cleanest cities in the world. It is certainly one of the quietest. I spent the afternoon and most of the evening getting medical tests in a sparkling new hospital wing, where it seemed I was the only patient. The doctors seemed less worried about my physical condition than my brain, blood, and bone status. I’m no medical expert, but I can recognize a cancer scan when I am subjected to one.