Bears Discover Fire

by Terry Bisson

  Dr. Kim looked cheerful enough. He had been expecting us.

  “I’m so glad you’re here; now perhaps we can begin to communicate,” he said in Cambridge-accented English. “As you probably know, the Shadow won’t talk with me.”

  “The Shadow?”

  “That’s what I call it. From your old American radio serial. ‘Who Knows what Evil lurks in the Hearts of Men? The Shadow knows!’”

  “You don’t look that old to me,” I said.

  “I’m not; I’ll be seventy-two next week, when the Diana returns, if I’m unfortunate enough to last that long.” He took a quick shot of PeaceAble from an imitation ebony spraypipe, and continued: “Collecting old radio tapes was a hobby I picked up when I was at university. They were forty-five years old even then, forty-five years ago. I don’t suppose you remember Sky King and his Radio Ranch?”

  “Nobody’s that old, Dr. Kim. I’m only seventy-six. How old do you have to be for this ghost-in-a-bowl?”

  “The Shadow,” he corrected. “Oh, you’re quite old enough. I’m old enough, actually, I think. Or would have been, if it weren’t for—”

  “Start at the beginning, Dr. Kim,” said Hvarlgen. “Please. The Major needs to know everything that has happened.”

  “The beginning? Then let’s start at the end, as the Shadow starts.” He laughed enigmatically. “I have learned one thing, at least: language is contained as much in the musculature as in the brain. The first time, I did as Sunda did; I stuck my hand into the bowl, and my brain was looking on, unattached, as the Shadow picked up my hand, and with it picked up a pencil—”

  “And wrote you a letter,” I said.

  “Drew me a picture,” Dr. Kim corrected. “Korean is at least partly ideographic.” He reached under the bed and pulled out a paper, on which was written:

  “Take me to your leader?” I guessed.

  “It means, more or less, ‘okay’; and it suggests a more intimate relationship, which I immediately implemented, so to speak, and which—”

  “More intimate?”

  “—resulted in this.”

  “Like Sunda’s message, it means ‘new growth,’” he said, “which I took, in my case, to mean cancer.”

  “Oh.”

  I must have winced, because he said, “Oh, it’s all right. I knew it already; colon cancer; I had known it for four months. I just hadn’t told Sunda because I didn’t think it mattered.”

  “Then it wasn’t the Shadow that—?” I asked.

  “Gave it to me? No,” said Dr. Kim. “The Shadow was in a position, so to speak, to detect it, that’s all.” He either grinned or grimaced in pain (it was hard to tell) and took another shot of PeaceAble. “Don’t forget, The Shadow knows.’”

  The young are sentimental around death but the old have no such problem. “Tough,” I said.

  “There are no happy endings,” Dr. Kim said. “At least, thanks to the Shadow, I got my trip back to the Moon.

  With any luck I might even end my days here. Wouldn’t it make a great tombstone, the Moon? Hanging there in the sky, bigger than a thousand pyramids. And lighted, to boot. Would put to rest forever the slander that all Koreans have good taste.” He paused for another shot. “But the problem is, that because of the cancer—apparently—the Shadow won’t relate to me. I think it mistakes the cancer for youth. That second contact was my last. So tomorrow it’s your turn, right?” He looked from me to Hvarlgen.

  Hvarlgen and I looked at each other.

  “So I’m next,” I said. “Old man number two.”

  “This is the point at which I give you the chance to back out,” Hvarlgen said. “Much as I hate to. But if you turn me down, I’ll still have time for one more shot; your alternate is doing his meds right now in Reykjavik.”

  I could tell she was lying; if she had only six days left, I was her only hope. “Why me in the first place?” I asked.

  “You were the oldest reasonably healthy male I could find on such short notice who was space qualified. I knew you’d been to Houbolt. Plus I liked your looks, Major. Intuition. You looked like the kind of guy who might stick his neck out.”

  “Neck?” laughed Dr. Kim, and she shot him a dirty look.

  “Of course, I could be wrong,” she said to me.

  She was gut-checking me but I didn’t mind; I hadn’t been gut-checked in years. I looked at Hvarlgen. I looked at Dr. Kim. I looked at the million stars beyond and figured what the hell.

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess I can stick my hand in a fishbowl for science.”

  Dr. Kim laughed again and Hvarlgen shot him an angry look. “There’s one thing you should know—” she began.

  Dr. Kim finished for her: “The Shadow doesn’t want to shake hands with you, Major Bewley. It wants to crawl up your ass and look around. Like it crawled up mine.”

  II

  I showed up at Grand Central the next morning wearing the bright orange tunic with the SETI patch, just to prove to Hvarlgen I was on her team. We had coffee. “Scared?”

  “Wouldn’t you be scared?” I said. “For one thing, this Shadow is a cancer detector. Then, the business with Mersault…”

  “It’s unlikely that our people in Reykjavik missed anything. And indications are that Mersault may have been independently suicidal. Zippe-Buisson hires some weirdos. But you’re right, Major, one never knows.”

  I followed her down the forty-meter tube to East. We were initiating the first contact session in the infirmary, so that Dr. Kim could participate, or at least observe. Hvarlgen was literally rearing to go: the chair was tilted back so far that she rode it almost prone.

  Three of the five periphery domes have magnolias—those reptilian trees love the Moon—but it is East’s that is the most lush, its leaves picking up the lunar palette from the regolith of the crater floor and processing it into a new, complex gray unseen before.

  Dr. Kim’s bed was under the tree. He was awake, waiting for us. He caressed the spraypipe in his fingers like a good-luck charm. “Good morning, colleagues,” he said.

  Hvarlgen rolled to his bedside and kissed his withered cheek.

  Two lunies rolled in a wheeled table; on it was the Shadow in its bowl. Another lunie carried the film camera on her shoulder. Another carried a bright yellow plastic chair. It was for me.

  The big moment had arrived. Hvarlgen and I approached the table together. When she picked up the bowl, I noticed that the Shadow pulled away from her hands toward the center. It moved in a rippling motion that both repelled and attracted my eyes.

  She put the bowl on the floor in front of the chair. “Let’s begin,” she said, clicking on the video recorder she carried on her lap. The film camera whirred as I slipped my pants off, over my shoes, and stood there naked under my tunic. It was 9:46 HT (Houston/Houbolt time) on the wall.

  I felt frightened. I felt embarrassed. Worse, I felt ridiculous, especially with the young lunies—girls and boys—sitting on the empty bed, watching.

  “Oh, Major, please quit worrying!” Hvarlgen said. “Women are used to being prodded and poked between their legs. Men can put up with it once in a while. Sit down!”

  I sat down; the yellow plastic was cold on my butt. Hvarlgen nudged my knees apart wordlessly and pushed the bowl between my feet, then rolled backward to the head of Dr. Kim’s bed, under the magnolia. I clutched pencil in one hand and paper in the other. Hvarlgen and Dr. Kim had explained what would happen, but it was still a shock.

  The Shadow moved—twisted—out of the bowl, flowed up between my legs, and disappeared up my ass.

  I watched it, fascinated. I felt no fear or dread. There was no “feeling” as such; it really was like a shadow. I kept myself covered by the tunic, out of modesty; but I knew as soon as the Shadow was inside me, because—

  There was someone else in the room. He was standing across the room, not far from the foot of Dr. Kim’s bed. He was not quite solid, and not quite full-sized, and he was flickering like a bad light bulb; but I knew immediately
“who” it was.

  It was me.

  I moved my arm slightly, to see if he would move his, like a mirror image, but he didn’t. He flickered and with each flicker got either bigger, or closer, or both. There was no frame of reference; no way to judge his size. It was somehow very clear that he or it was not in the room with us; not occupying the same space. It raised the hair on the back of my head, and judging from the palpable silence in the room, everyone else’s as well.

  We were seeing a ghost.

  It was Hvarlgen who finally spoke. “Who are you?”

  There was no answer.

  I tried moving my arm again but the Shadow (for already, that was how I thought of the image) answered none of my movements. Somehow that made it better; it was as if I were watching a film of myself and not a reflection. But it was an old film; I looked younger. And when I looked to one side a little, the image disappeared.

  “Who are you?” said Hvarlgen again; it was more a statement than a question. “He,” “it,”—the Shadow—started flickering, faster and faster, and I suddenly felt sick at my stomach.

  I bent over, almost retching; I covered my mouth and then tried to aim toward the bowl at the foot of the chair.

  But it didn’t matter—nothing came out, even though I saw the Shadow was pooled back in its bowl.

  I shook my hands and examined them; they were clean.

  The ghost was gone.

  The session was over. Hvarlgen was staring at me. I looked at my watch; it was 9:54. The whole thing had lasted six minutes.

  The pad and pencil lay on the floor where I had dropped them. The pad was blank.

  “Well, now, that was interesting,” said Dr. Kim, taking a long shot of PeaceAble.

  Hvarlgen sent the lunies out, and had coffee sent in, and we discussed the session over a light lunch. Very light; I was on the high-protein, low-fiber “astronaut’s diet” of moonjirky. Plus, I was still feeling a little queasy.

  We all agreed that the image was me, or an approximation of me. “But younger,” said Dr. Kim.

  “So what is it trying to say?” asked Hvarlgen. Neither Dr. Kim nor I answered; it seemed useless to speculate. She clicked on her video recorder. Instead of a holovid image, what came up was a ball of bright static. She fast-forwarded but nothing changed.

  “Damn! Just as I had suspected,” she said. “If we are to get any image at all, it will be on film. But film has to be processed chemically, which means it has to go all the way back to Earth before we’ll even know if it works. In the meantime—”

  “In the meantime,” Dr. Kim said, “Why don’t we try it again?”

  Hvarlgen got on her chair-phone and soon the lunies arrived with the Shadow in its bowl, the film camera, and the rest of the crew, who had presumably heard about the morning session. It was 1:35 (HT). Surprisingly, it was just as humiliating for me the second time. But science is science; I took off my pants. The film camera wheezed and whirred on a lunie’s shoulder. I held the pad and pencil in one hand, ready. Hvarlgen rolled back to Dr. Kim’s bed. I sat on the cold plastic chair and spread my legs. I forgot my embarrassment as the Shadow twisted out of its bowl and up—and disappeared—

  And there he was again. The Shadow. Again, the figure started small and flickered itself bigger and bigger, until it was about half the size of someone standing in the room with us; though we all knew somehow that it wasn’t. That it was far away.

  This time he was talking, though there was no sound. He stopped talking, then started again. He was wearing blue coveralls like I used to wear in the Service, not the orange tunic. I couldn’t see his feet no matter how hard I looked for them; it was as if my eyes glanced off. I wear a Service ring but I couldn’t see it; the Shadow’s hands were blurred. I wanted to ask him who he was, but I felt it was not my place. We had agreed earlier that no one but Hvarlgen was to speak.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  The voice, when it came, surprised us all: “Not a who.”

  Everyone in the room turned to look at me, even though it was not my voice. I would have turned, myself, had I not been the point toward which everyone was looking.

  “Then what are you?”

  “A communications protocol.” The sound of the voice was completely out of synch with the image’s mouth. Also, the sound did not seem to come from anywhere; I heard it directly with my mind, not my ears.

  “From where?” asked Hvarlgen.

  “A two-device.”

  The lunies sitting in a row on the bed were absolutely still. No one in the room was breathing; including me.

  “What is a two-device?” asked Hvarlgen.

  This time the lips were almost in synch with the words; “One and”—the Shadow inclined toward us in a curious, almost courtly gesture—“the Other.”

  The sound seemed to originate inside my head, like a memory of a voice. Like a memory, it seemed perfectly clear but characterless. I wondered if it were my voice, as the image was “my” image, but I couldn’t tell.

  “What Other?” Hvarlgen asked.

  “Only one Other.”

  “What do you want?”

  As if in answer, the image began to flicker again, and I was suddenly sick to my stomach. The next thing I knew I was looking down into the bowl, at the original dark non-substance we had called the Shadow. Though still dark it seemed clearer, and cold, and deep. I was suddenly conscious of the cold stars blazing through the dome overhead; the fierce vacuum all around; the cold plastic chair on my butt.

  “Major?”

  Hvarlgen’s hand was on my wrist. I looked up—to applause from the bed where the lunies were sitting, like bright yellow birds, all in a row.

  “Nobody leaves!” said Hvarlgen. She went around the room. All agreed on what the Shadow had said. All agreed that it had been inside their heads, more like the memory of a voice, or an imaginary voice, than a sound. All agreed that it had not been my voice.

  “Now everybody leave,” she said. “Dr. Kim and I need to have a talk.”

  “Including me?” I asked.

  “You can stay. And he can stay.” She pointed toward the bowl, which the lunies were placing back on its table.

  They left it by the door.

  “Damn!” said Hvarlgen. Irrationally, she shook the recorder but there was no record of the Shadow’s words, any more than of its image. “The problem is, we have no hard evidence of any communication at all. And yet we all know it happened.”

  Dr. Kim took a snort of PeaceAble and smiled somewhat inscrutably. “Unless we think the Major here was hypnotizing us.”

  “Which we don’t,” said Hvarlgen. It was late afternoon. We were having still more coffee under the magnolia.

  “But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is how can it make us hear without making a print, a track in the air.”

  “Clearly, it works directly on the hearing centers in the brain,” Dr. Kim said.

  “Without a physical event?” said Hvarlgen. “Without a material connection? That’s telepathy!”

  “It’s all physical,” said Dr. Kim. “Or none of it. Is that thing material? Maybe it accesses our brains visually. We were all looking at it when we heard it talk. The brain is stuff just as much as air is stuff. Light is stuff. Consciousness is stuff.”

  “So why the physical contact at all?” I asked. “The Shadow’s not really here; I can’t feel it, we can’t touch it or even photograph it. Why does it have to enter my body at all? If it does, why can’t it just sort of slip in through the skin, or the eyes, instead of… the way it does.”

  “Maybe it’s scanning you,” Hvarlgen said. “For the image.”

  “And maybe it can only scan certain types,” said Dr. Kim. “Or maybe it’s restricted. Just as we might be forbidden to trade with Stone Age tribesmen, they—whoever or whatever they are—might have a prohibition against certain stages or kinds of life.”

  “You mean the ‘New Growth’ business?” I asked.

  “Right. Maybe
old folks seem less vulnerable to them. Maybe the contact is destructive to growing tissue. Or even fatal. Look at what happened to Mersault. But I’m just guessing! And my guess is that you have not quite finished menopause, Sunda, right?”

  She smiled. Just as her scowls were smiles, her smiles were grimaces. “Not quite.”

  “See? And in my case, perhaps the flourishing cancer with its exorbitant greed for life was mistaken for youth.

  Anyway… perhaps we are dealing with prohibitions. Formalities. Perhaps even the innovative mode of contact is a formality, like a handshake. What could be more logical?” Dr. Kim took another snort of PeaceAble, filling the infirmary with a sweet heavy smell.

  “It’s hard to think of it as a handshake,” I said.

  “Why? The anus, the asshole in vulgar parlance, is sort of a joke, but in our secret heart of hearts, for all of us, it’s the seat—so to speak—of the physical being. It may be perceived by this Other as the seat of consciousness as well.

  We’re much more conscious of it than, say, the heart. Certainly more conscious of it physically than the brain. It alerts us to danger by tightening up. It even speaks from time to time…”

  “Okay, okay,” said Hvarlgen. “We get the point. Let’s get back to work. Shall we go again?”

  “Without the lunies?” Dr. Kim asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Because without a video or sound image, they are our only corroboration that there is any communication going on here. I know it’s your project, Sunda, but if I were you I would move more deliberately.”

  “You’re right. It’s almost five o’clock. Let’s wait and go after supper.”

  I had supper alone. Hvarlgen was on the phone, arguing with somebody named Sidrath. A poster on the wall over her head said D=96. Hvarlgen sounded pleading, then sarcastic, then pleading again; I felt like an eavesdropper, so I left without coffee and walked to East alone.

  Dr. Kim was asleep. The Shadow lay in its bowl. It was fascinating to look at it. It lay still but seemed, somehow, to be moving at great speed. It was dark but I could sense light behind it, like the stars through thin clouds. I was tempted to touch it; I reached out one finger…