The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  “Okay,” I said, “but what would happen if we did move them outside, Stu?”

  “I think you know.”

  “Maybe I do, Stu,” I said, “but I’d still like to hear.” This was Stu, so it had to be big. I was also remembering something he’d said about using the “mathematics of chaos” to talk to the universe: Why talk to submarines when you could talk to the stars?

  Sounding even more tired suddenly, he said, “The first time I tried them—actually, it was just one—that’s all I had then—it took a year. That was four years ago. I looked up at the sky and thought to myself, ‘What would it take to get them really interested—to make them really curious about us, the way kids would be?’ That Pioneer 10 message was so preachy, so self-centered. I thought maybe a transponder with nanopulse microwave and a streaming double-helix of ELF and EHF—simply because the wave profile would be so beautiful—would do it. And it did.”

  I was pretty sure I knew who “them” were, but I didn’t say a word.

  “I don’t know how far away they were that first time, but a year felt right. Actually, I’d figured they’d get here a little quicker. I’d seen too many strange and wonderful things in my life—heard them in the air waves, in the sea, from space—not to know they were out there. Maybe they were closer and just needed to think about it for a while. Maybe they needed to check back with their own navy and air force first. I have no idea, but the next time I took these things into the backyard—I had three of them by this time because I wanted to use them in a harmonic configuration, which would be prettier—it took them only two months to come. Either they were closer or they’d been that close all along. I’ll never know and I don’t need to.”

  He was looking at the ceiling and was, I could tell, having a hard time thinking. It was a long story for someone his age, sick as he was.

  “The first time they came,” he began again, “the Air Force—you know how they hate being one-upped by the Navy—caught them on radar at Vandenberg but the Navy caught them at Point Magu. Civilians saw it as far away as Ventura. You may have seen it on TV. The usual government disclaimer of ‘experimental aircraft’ and the ‘OOF-ologists’ claiming it was the real thing. This time they were right, but that’s not the point. The Air Force didn’t know who’d called them down, didn’t in fact know anyone had, so I had to tell them—same way I did with the wire. You know that joke about the hardworking donkey? The one you have to hit in the face with a two-by-four to get his attention first, before he’ll work? That’s what it’s been like my whole life, but who am I to complain? Like your dad, I’ve gotten to do what I’ve loved. I’ve gotten to see more miracles than most people ever do, just as I hope you will, too, in your life.”

  “When I told them I’d been the one—I contacted the Navy through NAVR this time—I’ve still got a friend there—and they contacted the Air Force, no one believed it. So I said, ‘Come and I’ll show you.’ They didn’t want to. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe it; it was that they didn’t want to. That’s how people are when human organizations get too big and have a life of their own. They’re thinking, ‘Stu is old and probably senile, so we don’t have to believe him, do we? Tell us we don’t.’

  “So I mailed one of these things to them. The DOD-EOD guys got it, thinking it was a bomb—though my name was on the package—but when they took it apart, it became clear to the NAVR guys what it was and what it wasn’t, and the Air Force nearly had a heart attack.”

  “What did they do then?”

  “They said, ‘Don’t do it again, Dr. Lundberg.’ That’s all. I phoned my NAVR friend and wrote letters to NAV-this and NAV-that—which you’re not supposed to do about classified matters, which it was now—but they still just said, ‘Don’t do it again. It’ll blind our pilots.’ Something silly like that. They knew the signals had reached those six little ships out there and that’s why the ships had come, but it’s still all they said. ‘It’ll blind our pilots’—something you’d say to a kid with a toy. I told them they could have the damn things. You know what they said?”

  I knew.

  “They said, ‘We don’t want them. You keep them. Just don’t use them. If you do, we’ll have to charge you with treason or felony endangerment of the population of California or something like that.’ I thought they were kidding—that someone had a sense of humor. I thought they’d come to the house at some point and take them away citing national security and patent-ownership and whatever else, but they haven’t. There’s a word for it these days, Marjorie tells me: ‘Denial.’ ”

  I wasn’t smiling, but Stu was. His grin was back somehow, though it looked like it hurt a lot to make it.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Stu.”

  “Don’t be.” He picked up one of the Frisbees and held it out. “Would you like one? I certainly don’t need both. Hundred ten volts, Brian. That’s all you need. Just watch where you aim it.”

  I had no idea what to say.

  When we were back in the house, sitting on his sofa, both of us silent, Stu finally said it:

  “So, Brian, should I write my memoir?”

  “No,” I said quickly. I was ready this time. “Let me write it for you. It’s not that I don’t already know the stories, right? Isn’t that why you’ve told them to me? So I’d know?”

  The grin softened.

  “Yes, it is.”

  So Stu got his memoir. We worked on it together—which is what he’d wanted, too. He got sicker, of course, and we had to take more and more breaks; but we got the taping done in two weeks and I got the writing done in another three; and when I was finished, he was still with us, just as I’d figured he’d be.

  “Do you want me to try to find a publisher for it?” I asked. I didn’t say “after you’re gone.” I didn’t need to.

  “No,” he answered. If he’d looked a hundred before, he looked two hundred now—head bald, eyes gray, not blue, and face a mess of wrinkles, but softer right now in the shade of the big mimosa in his backyard, where he liked to rest up on his favorite chaise lounge when we talked. “The Navy and Air Force probably wouldn’t like that. No one would believe any of it anyway, and what a shame that would be. . . .”

  “Would you like to publish it yourself? For family and friends.” We could probably get that done in a week or so. He could last that long, couldn’t he?

  “No,” he said. “It’s done and the doing was the point. You and I got to write it together, and that was the point, too, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. It was.

  He was having a hard time breathing, but he finally caught his breath and said:

  “Would you like to have it?”

  “Have what, Stu?”

  “The memoir.”

  “Won’t Marjorie want it?”

  It was weak, but it was a laugh. “She’s heard all the stories before—” he took another breath “—and I’m not sure even she believes them.”

  “Yes, I would,” I said quickly.

  Two weeks after that, one evening, lying on that same chaise lounge, Majorie in the kitchen noticing (she said later) strange lights over the patio, Stu left this world. Nothing loud, nothing messy. He simply went to sleep. As his doctor told my dad at the funeral, “His X-rays looked like a landing field at night, Jim. There wasn’t a bone that didn’t have cancer. He should’ve been in terrible pain, but for reasons I’ll never understand he wasn’t. . . .” My mom cried at the funeral, of course, and I could see my dad wanted to—he was losing more than a friend—but there was no way I was going to.

  I still have his memoir, of course—the only copy of it—though I haven’t looked at it since we finished it. I don’t need to. I know it by heart. He made sure of that.

  I’ve also still got that Frisbee from his workbench—one of the two no one wanted—and I just know Stu is up there somewhere waiting for me to use it.

  Stu

  Story Notes

  There was indeed a “Stu,” and my brother and I got to meet him mo
re than once, and he was indeed a good friend of our father’s. All of the inventions in this story are not only real, but were, in fact, Stu’s inventions—except of course for the last one (since as far as I know Frisbee has not yet patented an interstellar communication device). Our father was executive officer of the Navy Electronics Laboratory at Point Loma in San Diego and worked proudly and happily with scientists and engineers like Stu; and the man who, in reality, was Stu touched my life as profoundly as Stu touches the narrator’s. Which means, of course, that this story is about as literally autobiographical as any science fiction story could possibly be, right? But what fiction isn’t autobiographical—if not literally then metaphorically? After finishing my first novel, Humanity Prime, as a young man of twenty-four—and that novel, mind you, is the far-future story of a cybernetic mothership and a giant sea turtle, one who mentors a mutated merboy on a distant planet—I realized that the sentient characters in it were all and perfectly and with remarkable unconscious insight the members of my family. A wise writer from another field—my first writer-mentor, in fact—a family friend by the name of Carl Glick (Shake Hands with the Dragon)—had warned me about this (or should I say promised me it would be so?) when I was still a high school student: “You will see one day that even the most fantastic stories you write are autobiographical metaphors in which your deepest psyche understands much more than your fussy, feeble consciousness could possibly understand.” This has come true especially in recent years, and I am grateful: to have along for the ride in life someone smarter than oneself—one’s own unconscious Yoda, we might say—is a blessing. Who wouldn’t appreciate the company?

  This story appeared in SCIFICTION in 2005, one of the last stories before that remarkable online publication (yet another venue of quality fantasy, sf, and horror under the helm of Ellen Datlow) met its fate at the hands of corporate thinking.

  Moving On

  When John Klinger went out to the Mojave Witness, which he did as often as he could, he took the Bell 420. Flying it with his one good arm had gotten easier over the past few months, and he could forget he didn’t have two good ones. That was one reason he took it: He could forget the pink plastic.

  He would set the little helicopter down thirty meters from the shack at the eastern end of the Witness and close his eyes, waiting for the rotor wash to die down. If it was daytime, he would get out and check the three kilometers of electrified chain-link fence for any animals that had blundered into it in the night and bury them some distance away, thinking about death. He would stand for a moment in the shack’s doorway looking out at the endless sand the smog still hadn’t touched and wonder how much time he had. He would think about his parents, the quake-loosened bricks outside his apartment that had hit him, destroying the nerves in his arm, and what his twenty-six years of life really added up to.

  If it was night, he would sit for a moment in the Bell and watch the moths—like little ghosts—batter themselves against the single bulb by the shack’s front door. If there was a moon, he would remember what the Witness itself—the kilometer-long, open tank of water—looked like with the moonlight on its surface and wish he had hovered over it longer. He would find himself wondering how many weeks or months he had before Central got the funds for a new detector-translator system and his life would have to change: With new equipment he wouldn’t be able to justify so many visits, wouldn’t be able to come out like this every few days, lying about “recurrent problems.”

  Then he would go inside, sit down at the little card table in the shack and do what no fixer—no one in his position—was supposed to do: He would read the transcripts of what the Witness—listening day and night for the voices of the just-dead—had picked up from the Limbo.

  Whether it was simply against policy, or a misdemeanor, or a felony to read the transcripts, he could not remember, but he had been doing it now for months. It was simply a function of the amount of time he spent at this station, when other fixers were always on the move. Since he spent as much time here as he could—attending to the problems of a first-generation system and fabricating problems when he needed to—his “crime” had evolved logically enough, hadn’t it? He wanted to be out here away from the city, and so he was—two or three times a week. He’d had a radio for a while, and a video player small enough to fit on the card table beside the coffee maker, and later a few books, but these, he’d discovered, had been “baggage” from the city, and really had no place here. The transcripts belonged when so many other things did not, and one day he had begun to read them. He was the living, after all, and they were the dead, and here at least—at the Mojave Witness—that was all there was.

  Had he been like all the other fixers, the techs who kept the Witnesses all over Southern California working, Davis, his supervisor, would have moved him from one station to another throughout the Seventh District, all 200,000 square kilometers of it, and he would probably never have started reading. But Davis knew he liked the desert—needed it in his own way—and a fixer as good as he was, winner of Central’s Troubleshooter Award three out of five years, got what he wanted. What he wanted was this station. The voices—the transcripts in front of him on the table—were the ones that had come here. Not to Camel’s Back overlooking San Diego Bay, or Camp Pendleton’s Witness with its view of Pacific breakers, or Mullholland’s, or El Centro’s, but here—to the high desert, to the cold, dry peace of its winters, to the dreamy heat of its summers, to a place where there were no human voices other than these. Even he wasn’t a voice here. He didn’t sing. He didn’t talk to himself like a desert rat. He didn’t play the radio or VCR. It felt wrong to, so he didn’t.

  Had he loved the city, as fixers like Corley and Tompai seemed to, the transcripts wouldn’t have interested him either. For people like them—who liked hanging out in the tech lobby at Central, even had fun playing with the design software on their assigned terminals in their assigned cubicles with the fluorescent lighting—the living were very much alive. And the just-dead—their voices, the transcripts of their ethereal babble—were just that: ghosts, gone, moving on.

  For him, month by month, the opposite had somehow become true.

  The Justice Department, under whose legal jurisdiction the Witnesses operated, required printouts as well as tapes—a hedge against malfunction or criminal sabotage—and so the transcripts were printed on a simple printer even as the transmissions were being received and tapes being made; and one night, alone, reluctant to return the Bell 420 to the Sheriff’s Aviation helipad, or himself to his apartment in Corona, he had started reading.

  On August 16, six days before his twenty-seventh birthday, in the meanest heat of the upper-desert summer, he phoned from his apartment in Corona and informed Davis that he’d need another overnighter at the Witness. Davis, of course, swore.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re spending a helluva lot of time up there, Klinger.”

  “It’s the translator drive, sir. You know how old the boards are.” And then he added: “I don’t like spending my nights out there any more than you would.”

  He held his breath.

  “Bullshit, Klinger, but when the new system comes in, you won’t have to. Try to make it in to Central on Monday at least, will you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When the man’s image was gone from the phonescreen by his bed, Klinger started to breathe again.

  If Central was expecting the new equipment any time soon, Davis would have told him, wouldn’t he?

  He drove through the heat of the Inland Empire to Sheriff’s Aviation headquarters in Rialto, where, if he was willing to listen to McKinney talk weapons for an hour—over coffee, in the snack bar—the old pot-bellied bigot would let him take the Bell 420 again, instead of some county ground vehicle, which was all the J.D. agreement with the County of San Bernardino required. It wasn’t that he didn’t like McKinney. McKinney was the one who’d taught him—ignoring his prosthesis kindly—to fly in the days when Klinger would spend his off-hours han
ging around the airport like some P.D. wannabe. Like some deranged uncle, McKinney seemed to want Klinger to have the very best, so of course he liked the man. It was just the constant talking. Sometimes it drove Klinger crazy.

  But he listened again, and again McKinney gave him the helicopter, and again Klinger lifted off into the heat of summer.

  That afternoon the air conditioning in the shack went out. He didn’t need to step outside and check the tap lines that ran to the nearest power-line support tower a quarter kilometer away. Everything else was working. He got down on his hands and knees and pulled the thing apart. A box of spare parts he’d collected over the past months was under the card table, and when he discovered he didn’t have the part he needed—an alternator—he got up calmly and plugged in the swamp cooler, the one he’d bought with his own money. He closed the one blind, got out the Reynolds Wrap, and did the window. The equipment could operate at up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit without any trouble, so the air conditioner was for the living, and as a consequence, in Central’s eyes, didn’t really matter. He knew it was the heat that helped keep other fixers away. “You want the Mojave?” Tompai had once said. “You can have it. You’re already dead, Klinger.”

  It wasn’t true. He’d never felt more alive than he did when he was out here under the stars, cool or sweaty, thinking about life and reading the printouts. It was the morgue of the living—the cities—that made him feel like a corpse, and the feeling wasn’t getting any better. He went to his apartment—he went to Central—less and less, and the only thing that really worried him was how long he had before the new equipment arrived.