The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

She looks at the helicopter, then at me, then the copter again, then back at me. Again it’s that: Should I be frightened or not? Except now I’m frightened. I try not to show it but she senses it. I see her getting scared, too.

  The copter circles. I have to hurry—but I don’t want to hurt her but her skin is so tough! And who knows, if I do find one or two things, will that be all that’s hidden there? “Hang on.”

  She hugs herself with those inadequate arms. Even before I start she makes little doglike… or rather, birdlike sounds. “Sing,” I say. “Sing your oobie do.”

  I feel two lumps. I dig in. I say, “Almost done,” when I’ve hardly begun.

  Then we run. Without our blankets, without our food, except what Rosie has in her vest.

  “They can’t follow now.” I hope that’s true.

  We stick to the old path that circles over the pass. We try to stay close to rocks and under what trees there are. Even running as we do, I can’t not think about how beautiful it is up here. When I first saw it, years ago, I shouted when I came around the corner.

  She’s way ahead of me in no time—those long strong legs. And we’re not carrying much of anything. I catch up when she finally turns to look for me. We both look back. The helicopter still hovers. I left the chip and button bullet back there at our camping spot. They think she’s still there. Maybe they don’t know about me.

  She’s different from those others. What was she for.? That is, besides killing those like me.?

  It starts to snow. Thank God or worse luck, I don’t know which. It’ll hide our tracks and the helicopter won’t fly, but we don’t have food or blankets.

  We cross the pass and dip into the next valley. We find a sheltered spot among a mass of fallen boulders where the whole side of a cliff came down. Some boulders are on top of each other making a roof. Boulders over, boulders under—not a particularly comfortable spot but we huddle there and rest. We take stock. All we have is what’s in Rosie’s vest, a little leftover jerky (we eat it), the frying pan, and cornmeal. We can make corn cakes if we don’t catch fish.

  This is just a mountain storm. If we can get far enough down we’ll walk out of it. If we’re lucky it’ll last just long enough to cover our tracks. I tell Rosie. She lies at my feet still panting, I stoke her knobby head.

  “How’s your neck.?”

  “Hh… hoo khay.”

  She sleeps. Murmuring a whole series of Mmmms and then, Mmmush, and, Mmmushka.

  As the storm eases and we’re some rested, I wake her and we start down. After an hour we’re out of the snow and wind and into a hanging meadow. I’ve been over this pass but not this far.

  I’m worried. Rosie is sluggish and dreamy, flopping along, tripping a lot. Poor thing, all she has on is her vest. She’s cold and with reptiles… or part-reptiles…. I don’t want to build a fire but I must. The copter’s gone, maybe it’s all fight to now.

  “My poor fierce friend,” I say. She grins. I take her hand and sit her down. “We’re going to have a nice big fire. You rest. I’ll find the wood.”

  “I’ll hhh… hhh… hhh.”

  “No you won’t. I’m going by myself. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  She mews, turns away, and curls up.

  On this side there’s a lot less snow, so not hard going. I gather brush, dead limbs, and drag the whole batch back to her, flop down, my arm around her. I see her eyes flicker, though the nictitating membrane closes as she does it. She doesn’t wake. I’ll have to make the fire right now.

  How does a sick reptile show how sick it is? All I know is, she doesn’t look right and doesn’t feel right.

  I build the fire as close to her as I dare. Finally she seems in a more normal sleep. I sleep, too.

  I wake with a start. Hibernate! Do they? All those others, too. But she’s been mixed with other genes. For sure, some human.

  I wake her by mistake as I get out the frying pan and the cornmeal. I’m melting snow, first to drink and then to make corncakes. She drinks as if she’s been out in the desert for days. Then, “I’mm mmhungry.’ Then she sees what little cornmeal we have and says, “Mmmm nnnot ssso…. Nnnot hungry,” she says again. “Ooobie, baloobie, nnnnot.”

  “Ooobie, baloobie, do eat me. Roll me in corn meal. I’m old and I’m tired.”

  All of a sudden it’s not a joke.

  “Kkkh kkkh! Kh khcan’t dooo that! Oooooh!’

  “I thought that’s what you were made for… born for.”

  “Kkh can’t.”

  “You’ll die. Look how thin you are.”

  “I’mmm tem po rary. Temmm po po rary.’ She sings it like a song like she doesn’t care. Does she understand what it means? I wonder if it’s true. Perhaps they all are—were.

  “Mmmmmm all temmm po po! rary.”

  “What makes you think you’re temporary?”

  “Mmmmush kh knew.”

  “She you? How could she!”

  “Kkh kh ntmno! I sssaw kher eyes. Sssscared. I kh khfound out. I kh… kh… kread.”

  “You’re only half grown.”

  “Have a kh kh tth timer.”

  I don’t know what I see in those lizardy eyes of hers. “Don’t you like it here? Don’t you care anything about being alive?”

  “Oh! Kh! Oooh! Kh!” She does a hopping, twisting dance, those tiny arms raised. It tells how she feels, better than her words ever could.

  “Mmmmy kh heart,’ she says, “hasss kth th timer.”

  “How long is temporary.”

  “I sh should dannnce. Ssssing. Mnnnow! And lllook. Lllook a lllot! Yesssss! Lottts. Mmm then kh kgo for goood mmmmbig bh bones.”

  We’ll build another cabin. Here in this hanging valley, sheltered under boulders and trees and next to a good fishing stream. With her help we’ll have one up in no time. We’ll dance and sing and look around a lot. At the smallest and the largest… the near and the far… stars, mountain peaks, beetles….

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct./Nov. 2001

  Grandma

  GRANDMA used to be a woman of action. She wore tights. She had big boobs, but a teeny-weeny bra. Her waist used to be twenty-four inches. Before she got so hunched over she could do way more than a hundred of everything, pushups, sit-ups, chinning…. She had naturally curly hair. Now it’s dry and fine and she’s a little bit bald. She wears a babushka all the time and never takes her teeth out when I’m around or lets me see where she keeps them, though of course I know. She won’t say how old she is. She says the books about her are all wrong, but, she says, that’s her own fault. For a long while she lied about her age and other things, too.

  She used to be on every search and rescue team all across these mountains. I think she might still be able to rescue people. Small ones. Her set of weights is in the basement. She has a punching bag. She used to kick it, too, but I don’t know if she still can do that. I hear her thumping and grunting around down there—even now when she needs a cane for walking. And talk about getting up off the couch!

  I go down to that gym myself sometimes and try to lift those weights. I punch at her punching bag. (I can’t reach it except by standing on a box. When I try to kick it, I always fall over.)

  Back in the olden days Grandma wasn’t as shy as she is now. How could she be and do all she did? But now she doesn’t want to be a bother. She says she never wanted to be a bother, just help out is all.

  She doesn’t expect any of us to follow in her footsteps. She used to, but not anymore. We’re a big disappointment. She doesn’t say so, but we have to be. By now she’s given up on all of us. Everybody has.

  It started… we started with the idea of selective breeding. Everybody wanted more like Grandma: Strong, fast-thinking, fast-acting, and with the desire… that’s the most important thing… a desire for her kind of life, a life of several hours in the gym every single day. Grandma loved it. She says (and says and says), “I’d turn on some banjo music and make it all into a dance.”

  Back wh
en Grandma was young, offspring weren’t even thought of, since who was there around good enough for her to marry? Besides, everybody thought she’d last forever. How could somebody like her get old? is what they thought.

  She had three… “husbands” they called them (donors, more like it), first a triathlon champion, then a prize fighter, then a ballet dancer.

  There’s this old wives’ tale of skipping generations, so, after nothing good happened with her children, Grandma (and everybody else) thought, surely it would be us grandchildren. But we’re a motley crew. Nobody pays any attention to us anymore.

  I’m the runt. I’m small for my age, my foot turns in, my teeth stick out, I have a lazy eye…. There’s lots of work to be done on me. Grandma’s paying for all of it though she knows I’ll never amount to much of anything. I wear a dozen different kinds of braces, teeth, feet, a patch over my good eye. My grandfather, the ballet dancer!

  Sometimes I wonder why Grandma does all this for me, a puny, limping, limp-haired girl. What I think is, I’m her real baby at last. They didn’t let her have any time off to look after her own children—not ever until now, when she’s too old for rescuing people. She not only was on all the search and rescue teams, she was a dozen search and rescue teams all by herself, and often she had to rescue the search and rescue teams.

  Not only that, she also rescued animals. She always said the planet would die without its creatures. You’d see her leaping over mountains with a deer under each arm. She moved bears from camp-grounds to where they wouldn’t cause trouble. You’d see her with handfuls of rattlesnakes gathered from golf courses and carports, flying them off to places where people would be safe from them and they’d be safe from people.

  She even tried to rescue the climate, pulling and pushing at the clouds. Holding back floods. Re-raveling the ozone. She carried huge sacks of water to the trees of one great dying forest. In the long run there was only failure. Even after all those rescues, always only failure. The bears came back. The rattlesnakes came back.

  Grandma gets to thinking all her good deeds went wrong. Lots of times she had to let go and save… maybe five babies and drop three. I mean even Grandma only had two arms. She expected more of herself. I always say, “You did save lots of people. You kept that forest alive ten years longer than expected. And me. I’m saved.” That always makes her laugh, and I am saved. She says, “I guess my one good eye can see well enough to look after you, you rapscallion.”

  She took me in after my parents died. (She couldn’t save them. There are some things you just can’t do anything about no matter who you are, like drunken drivers. Besides, you can’t be everywhere.)

  When she took me to care for, she was already feeble. We needed each other. She’d never be able to get along without me. I’m the saver of the saver.

  How did we end up this way, way out here in the country with me her only helper? Did she scare everybody else off with her neediness? Or maybe people couldn’t stand to see how far down she’s come from what she used to be. And I suppose she has gotten difficult, but I’m used to her. I hardly notice. But she’s so busy trying not to be a bother, she’s a bother. I have to read her mind. When she holds her arms around herself, I get her old red sweatshirt with her emblem on the front. When she says, “Oh dear,” I get her a cup of green tea. When she’s on the couch and struggles and leans forward on her cane, trembling, I pull her up. She likes quiet. She likes for me to sit by her, lean against her, and listen to the birds along with her. Or listen to her stories. We don’t have a radio or TV set. They conked out a long time ago, and no one thought to get us new ones, but we don’t need them. We never wanted them in the first place.

  Grandma sits me down beside her, the lettuce planted, the mulberries picked, sometimes a mulberry pie already made (I helped), and we just sit. “I had a grandma,” she’ll say, “though I know, to look at me, it doesn’t seem like I could have. I’m older than most grandmas ever get to be, but we all had grandmas, even me. Picture that: Every single person in the world with a grandma.” Then she giggles. She still has her girlish giggle. She says, “Mother didn’t know what to make of me. I was opening her jars for her before I was three years old. Mother…. Even that was a long time ago.”

  When she’s in a sad mood, she says everything went wrong. People she had just rescued died a week later of something that Grandma couldn’t have helped. Hanta virus or some such that they got from vacuuming a closed room, though sometimes Grandma had just warned them not to do that. (Grandma believes in prevention as much as in rescuing.)

  I’ve rescued things. Lots of them. Nothing went wrong, either. I rescued a junco with a broken wing. After rains I’ve rescued stranded worms from the wet driveway and put them back in our vegetable garden. I didn’t let Grandma cut the suckers off our fruit trees. I rescued mice from sticky traps. I fed a litter of feral kittens and got fleas and worms from them. Maybe this rescuing is the one part of Grandma I inherited.

  Who’s to say which is more worthwhile, pushing atom bombs far out into space or one of these little things I do? Well, I do know which is more important, but if I were the junco I’d like being rescued.

  Sometimes Grandma goes out, though rarely. She gets to feeling it’s a necessity. She wears sunglasses and a big floppy hat and scarves that hide her wrinkled-up face and neck. She still rides a bicycle. She’s so wobbly it’s scary to see her trying to balance herself down the road. I can’t look. She likes to bring back ice-cream for me, maybe get me a comic book and a licorice stick to chew on as I read it. I suppose in town they just take her for a crazy lady, which I guess she is.

  When visitors come to take a look at her, I always say she isn’t home, but where else would a very, very, very old lady be but mostly home? If she knew people had come she’d have hobbled out to see them and probably scared them half to death. And they probably wouldn’t have believed it was her, anyway. Only the president of the Town and Country Bank—she rescued him a long time ago—I let him in. He’ll sit with her for a while. He’s old, but of course not as old as she is. And he likes her for herself. They talked all through his rescue and really got to know each other back then. They talked about tomato plants and wildflowers and birds. When she rescued him they were flying up with the wild geese. (They still talk about all those geese they flew with and how exciting that was with all the honking and the sound of wings flapping right beside them. I get goose-bumps—geesebumps?—just hearing them talk about it.) She should have married somebody like him, pot-belly, pock-marked face, and all. Maybe we’d have turned out better.

  I guess you could say I’m the one that killed her—caused her death, anyway. I don’t know what got into me. Lots of times I don’t know what gets into me and lots of times I kind of run away for a couple of hours. Grandma knows about it. She doesn’t mind. Sometimes she even tells me, “Go on. Get out of here for a while.” But this time I put on her old tights and one of the teeny-tiny bras. I don’t have breasts yet so I stuffed the cups with Kleenex. I knew I couldn’t do any of the things Grandma did, I just thought it would be fun to pretend for a little while.

  I started out toward the hill. It’s a long walk but you get to go through a batch of piñons. But first you have to go up an arroyo. Grandma’s cape dragged over the rocks and sand behind me. It was heavy, too. To look at the satiny red outside you’d think it would be light, but it has a felt lining. “Warm and waterproof,” Grandma said. I could hardly walk. How did she ever manage to fly around in it?

  I didn’t get very far before I found a jackrabbit lying in the middle of the arroyo half-dead (but half-alive, too), all bit and torn. I’ll bet I’m the one that scared off whatever it was that did that. That rabbit was a goner if I didn’t rescue it. I was a little afraid because wounded rabbits bite. Grandma’s cape was just the right thing to wrap it in so it wouldn’t.

  Those jackrabbits weigh a lot. And with the added weight of the cape….

  Well, all I did was sprain my ankle. I mean I wasn’
t really hurt. I always have the knife Grandma gave me. I cut some strips off the cape and bound myself up good and tight. It isn’t as if Grandma has a lot of capes. This is her only one. I felt bad about cutting it. I put the rabbit across my shoulders. It was slow going, but I wasn’t leaving the rabbit for whatever it was to finish eating it. It began to be twilight. Grandma knows I can’t see well in twilight. The trouble is, though she used to see like an eagle, Grandma can’t see very well anymore either.

  She tried to fly as she used to do. She did fly. For my sake. She skimmed along just barely above the sage and bitterbrush, her feet snagging at the taller ones. That was all the lift she could get. I could see, by the way she leaned and flopped like a dolphin, that she was trying to get higher. She was calling, “Sweetheart. Sweetheart. Where are yoouuu?” Her voice was almost as loud as it used to be. It echoed all across the mountains.

  “Grandma, go back. I’ll be all right.” My voice can be loud, too.

  She heard me. Her ears are still as sharp as a mule’s.

  The way she flew was kind of like she rides a bicycle. All wobbly. Veering off from side to side, up and down, too. I knew she would crack up. And she looked funny flying around in her print dress. She only has one costume and I was wearing it.

  “Grandma, go back. Please go back.”

  She wasn’t at all like she used to be. A little fall like that from just a few feet up would never have hurt her a couple of years ago. Or even last year. Even if, as she did, she landed on her head.

  I covered her with sand and brush as best I could. No doubt whatever was about to eat the rabbit would come gnaw on her. She wouldn’t mind. She always said she wanted to give herself back to the land. She used to quote, I don’t know from where, “All to the soil, nothing to the grave.” Getting eaten is sort of like going to the soil.

  I don’t dare tell people what happened—that it was all my fault—that I got myself in trouble sort of on purpose, trying to be like her, trying to rescue something.