The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  There has been much useless noise and senseless talk from the Voice these days. It is annoying because I must concentrate on loving Diane and caring for the baby. So I wanted the Voice to leave. It left.

  “Entities Be Simply Damned! The spheroid ceased to exist, assistant. How far can they go, assistant?” The beush rose, screamed hysterically for three seconds, and then fired the hand weapon point-blank at the neck of his assistant.

  The sharks come today, because Diane is having another baby. Diane hurts, and there is more blood than last time. Her face is not pretty when she hurts, as it is pretty when she sleeps. So I want her to sleep. Her face is pretty now with the smile on her lips.

  “Fourteen thousand Energi ceased to exist, spheroid ceased to exist, and another reproduction. Warp-space! How far will they go?”

  It has been hundreds of days. Faces keep appearing, but I continue to want them to go away. Diane has had eighteen babies. The oldest are swimming around and playing with the porpoises. Diane and I spend most of the time teaching the children by showing them things, and by giving them our thoughts by touching them.

  Today I found that none of the children have Voices. I could want them to have Voices, but the children’s thoughts tell me that it is not right to have a Voice.

  The eldest boy says that we should leave the tank, that a greater “tank” is around us, and that it is easier to move around in that greater tank. He also says that we must guard ourselves against Faces outside. That is strange, but the boy is a good boy. Many times he knows that things will happen before they do. He is a good boy. He is almost as tall as I am.

  The eldest girl is pretty like Diane, her body very white and soft but, since I wanted it so, her hair is golden, instead of dark. The boy likes her very much, and I have seen them together, touching.

  Tomorrow I will explain to him that if he wants something, he will get it. So he must want a baby.

  “Query? The Energi will bomb-drop the ‘aquarium’? War declared against us? War declared? Entities be wholly damned! Negative! Negativvv!” The disintegrator was fired once more, this time into the orange eye of the beush himself, by himself, and for the good of himself.

  When, if I ever do want the Voice to come back, it will be very surprised to know that Diane has had twenty-four babies; that the three eldest boys have mated twice, once, and twice, and have had four babies. The Voice will also be surprised to know that it took all twenty-nine of us to want all the Faces around the tank to die, as the eldest boy said to do. We could not tell, but the boy said that six million Faces were dead. That seems impossible to me, but the boy is always right.

  Tomorrow we are leaving the tank. We will want to leave it; it is getting crowded. The boy says that beyond the greater tank, which we will also leave, there is enough space for all the babies Diane could have if she lived forever.

  Forever, he said. It would be nice to live forever. I think I’ll want. . . .

  The Faces Outside

  Story Notes

  It was a postcard sunny day in San Diego when I opened the letter from Fred Pohl—editor of Worlds of if and Galaxy magazines—telling me that he wanted to use this story in his magazine, if. I literally jumped for joy. I was sixteen, was reading Writer’s Digest avidly, had the hots for two girls I was way too shy to ask out (one was dating a basketball player and the other was as shy as I was), and it was my very first sale. I was ecstatic. I was a writer and wasn’t that more important than anything? Yes, it was. Actually, I’d started writing four years earlier thanks to a fellow seventh grader who was writing stories when I met him and who, when I saw him again five years later said (as he got into his red Thunderbird and prepared to return to Lubbock, Texas), “How can you possibly still be writing, Bruce? Haven’t you discovered girls yet?” My seventh grade attempts were a satirical illustrated guide to our teachers, a story about two fisherman (I loved fishing), and another story whose buried-treasure plotline and stock characters were so lifeless even I couldn’t finish it. Later that year I saw my first copy of Astounding. It was sticking out of a girl’s purse in my math class, had a picture of a woodsman peering through a door into an alien world, and was, I’m afraid, more interesting than that or any other girl. But it was later in Italy, where our gentle Cold War-warrior father was stationed with NATO for two years and I was reading two sf novels a week, that I really went crazy and began writing up a storm. Our mother, an underdog-championing anthropologist, decided that my brother Jack and I were not going to attend a base school and eat cheeseburgers all day, so we were sent to school in the little communist fishing village where we lived. She couldn’t have been wiser. Those two years were magical and life-shaping: witches who lived in little huts in the olive groves, poisoning cats; long Cinemascope and well-plotted science fiction dreams every night (not to mention the only precognitive dreams I’ve ever had); friends who were never mean to younger kids; families that were families; a man without a throat who spoke by spitting air; a maid with one white eye and one blue eye; classes in Italian literature proud of its romantic passion; and classes segregated by gender, so that girls couldn’t possibly be a distraction from our studies, art, and writing. This was, in fact, the village that in one local legend Mary Shelley dreamed the dream that became Frankenstein; and it was certainly the bay to which her husband, the poet Percy, failed to return one night, drowning in the Ligurian Sea in a storm. In that village I wrote my first novel—fourteen-year-olds are, after all, notorious for writing novels more easily and confidently than the rest of us—and this one, a science-fictional approach, not unlike von Däniken’s, to the entire history, both past and future, of mankind, I craftily lost years ago. Two years later and back in the U.S., trying to feel like an American kid again (but mainly trying to get over that shyness with girls), I wrote “The Faces Outside” the way I wrote stories then—using photographs as inspiration—in this case, teenager that I was, a photograph of a semi-naked girl swimming in a swimming pool and two completely naked porpoises swimming in a tank, both from a photographic annual I’d run across on a newsstand and, with dilated pupils, had bought. In Italy I’d studied Latin, French, and Italian, which explains my interest in “alien” languages; my interest in psychic phenomena continues to this day, as does an affection for “naïve” and colloquial first-person stories. “The Faces Outside” appeared in 1963, when I was seventeen; was picked up for Judith Merril’s The 9th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F; and was later reprinted in the Asimov/Greenberg Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 25. Five years later many of its elements would appear again in that very young man’s first novel, a stream-of-consciousness telepathic ode to merpeople, Humanity Prime.

  Angels

  The creature she’d had them make cost her the last piece of forest outside Siena. The one with the little medieval chapel in it, the tall umbrella pines shading a forest floor no tourist had ever walked upon.

  It cost her the two rocky islands just south of Elba, and the lead mines at Piombino, which she had never cared about, and the villa on Lake Garda, which she had, because, so small and intimate, it had been one of her father’s favorites.

  When she ordered the doctors from Milan to alter the creature’s spine and shoulder blades to accept the remarkable wings, it cost her the thirty-meter ketch as well—the one with the artificial brain that trimmed the sails perfectly—the one she had used only once, forty years ago, and had never really wanted anyway. And when the wings did not take, when the doctors needed to try again, it cost her the two altar paintings of angels by Giotto from her father’s hunting lodge outside Siena, where she had spent her childhood with her brother and sisters, and which her father had loved. She had not wanted to sell the paintings, but selling them had helped her to remember him—to see him standing in the long hallway of the lodge, on the green Carrara marble floor, looking down at her and smiling in the gray suit he always wore. He seemed to be laughing, to be saying: Yes, you may sell them!

  It was the wings, she reali
zed—the sale of the ketch through an electronic brokerage in Nice—that had alerted her older brother, who found her one day in her apartment in Lucca and in his rage shouted: “What are you doing, Pupa? What do you imagine you are doing?” She knew he meant: You are doing this to hurt us. We know you are.

  She had taken a room in the old walled city of Lucca, near the ancient university there, above a store that still sold wood-pulp books, but Giancarlo found her nevertheless and shouted at her, as always. As did her sister Olivia the very next week, while Francesca, the youngest at ninety-three, sent a letter instead. “How can you be doing this?” they all asked her, when they actually meant to say: How can you be doing this to us, Pupa? How?

  They did not know she knew what they had done to her children, and this gave them the courage to ask, she told herself.

  They were afraid, of course, that she would continue to sell her possessions until everything their father had left her was gone. They were so afraid, in fact, that they were arranging, even now, for doctors from Rome and Turin to testify about her “illness,” this madness of hers, in court. These doctors had not interviewed her in person, but that did not matter. What she was doing, her lawyers said, was enough—enough for doctors with reputations like theirs to testify against her. “This thing you are having made for you, egrigia Signora, is quite enough,” they’d told her.

  At these words the world felt a little darker, and she had to remind herself that this was why she was so willing to leave it.

  The first time she was allowed to see him, she found she could not look at him for long. He wasn’t yet finished; that was all. A woman of child-bearing age, chosen by the doctors from a list, had carried the fertilized ovum for her. At one month they’d removed it. It was not like a fetus, the way an infant grew. There were ways to make it grow quickly outside a woman. It would take six months, they’d said.

  He was already the size of a man, yet the skin was like scar tissue, covered with a dozen layers of gauze as he lay in a room-sized tent whose material she could barely see through now. The room smelled of chemicals. The light was too bright. His face was covered, too—with a mask that made the eyes bulge like an insect’s, which frightened her. It should not have, she knew. It was simply the way he was being grown, she told herself again.

  But it did frighten her, and she had to turn away.

  When he was at last finished and the gauze was removed, he appeared to be sleeping. Blood substitutes rich in glucose and oxygen were flowing through his veins, the doctors informed her, but from where she stood outside his tent she could not see tubing: There should be tubing, shouldn’t there? She could see only the jaundice color of his arms on the bed, his legs parted akimbo under the sheet, like a child’s. For weeks she had imagined that he would be able to say something to her at this moment, but that was silly, she knew. It had been a daydream only, week after week, in her little room in Lucca; nothing more. It was not something the doctors had ever promised. Even if he had been awake, he could not have spoken, she knew. He knew no words to speak.

  The eyes did not open for days.

  When they allowed her into his tent for the first time, they made her bathe first, dried her with gusts of hot air, then gave her a thin garment to wear. As she approached his bed, she saw that his eyes were open at last, that they were watching her, although now and then they rolled back into his head like white marbles and his mouth fell slack. She looked at the doctor beside her, questioning, but the woman nodded, as if saying: Do not worry, Signora. He is doing fine.

  She was afraid—more afraid than she could ever remember being—but she leaned over nevertheless and touched her lips to his forehead, the way she had done so long ago to three children . . . her own . . . or someone’s. She could not remember. No. That wasn’t true. She could remember. She’d had three children—a gangly, dark-haired son when she was very young, and then, when she was nearly sixty, two daughters as well. She’d touched her lips to their three foreheads in this same way.

  She put her lips to his forehead again and felt his eyes roll away. But he did not pull away from her or hit at her, and these, she realized, were the only things she’d really been afraid of.

  One afternoon in August, when the tent was gone and she was standing over his bed, she asked the doctors and nurses to leave them alone. The bed was only a bed. It was the kind any human being could sleep in comfortably. A father, a mother. A child. She could not remember a bed like it from the long century of her life, but it was somehow familiar—a bed a father might sleep in, one a child might climb into in the morning while he slept. A dream, a wish. Nothing more.

  His body was blond, just like hers. As she’d told them it should be. It was long and heavy-boned, too, like hers, but the curls on his head were those of a marble god—Athenian, not Spartan—as she’d requested. It had not been difficult, they’d told her. The genetic material was there, they’d said; the alterations, where necessary, would be easy. It was only that no one had ever asked for something like this to be done, or had had the money to pay for it.

  The wings had been another matter entirely. Caravaggio’s sweeping feathers, the glory of Leda’s swan, not the puny things a Giotto might paint. Grown separately—not a part of him at all—and perhaps that had been the problem.

  Later, as she sat in a small room that smelled faintly of jasmine, she would remember how on this very August afternoon, when the doctors had left them alone at last, when the first pair of wings were doing their best to take, and the osteomyelitis had not yet set in, there had still been hope. The shoulders looked massive; and they would need to be, whether he ever really moved the wings or not, whether the shoulders did nothing more than keep them away from the naked back, so that the stiff quills would not rub the skin raw. He would never fly, of course. No amount of wealth could buy that and this she had known all along. She had simply wanted him to have wings because they were beautiful, because she could remember seeing paintings of beautiful wings somewhere.

  The organ between his legs was beautiful, too. Pale, golden, and rosy—and perfect. It hung like David’s, like the white marble under its new dome in Florence, where tourists could walk by it each day. Just as she’d told the doctors it should be. She’d told them: Make it so that even when it is soft, even when he is sleeping, or spent, it is beautiful. Make it so that women will want to touch it even in death.

  She had offered them the director of archives at the Pitti Palace, the man who could provide them with drawings by Michelangelo, or arrange for holograms of the statue itself to be delivered if they were needed. But the doctors had said No. There were equations for the arc and symmetry of such things, they’d told her, and they would use these.

  His arms were covered with hair the color of sunlight, a golden down, and this had been easy, too. Her father had been German, her mother Northern Italian; the blond hair was there to work with. The doctors had seen it in the genetic mapping. It would cost little. Growing the fetus outside a womb would be the costly thing.

  He was awake and staring at her now, the wings bound tightly with gauze behind him and supported by a pillow, the sheet gathered to one side of his naked body. He was not embarrassed, she saw. Embarrassment would be one of the things he would have to learn, of course.

  One arm was across his stomach, the other by his side. The wings, even with the feathers bound, did not seem to bother him. He looked relaxed and the legs, as always, lay akimbo. They would always lie that way—for as long as he should live, she told herself. These were the habits a body was born with. She could see clearly how each of her own three children had slept—a boy, two girls—each lying a bit differently, like paintings in a hallway somewhere, like holograms inseparable from their souls.

  She could not help herself. She tried, but she could not. She imagined what it would be like to make love to him, to feel that perfect organ inside her, her own arms strong once more, her hands on his shoulders perhaps, or her palms on his chest, his curls bright in the sunl
ight of the garden at Assisi or the topiary garden at Parma, the wings moving as if with a life of their own, his naked back reddening under the sun, arching even as her own back arched, then falling slowly like a sigh from the roses and snapdragons around them.

  On that August afternoon, when the doctors left them, she imagined what it might be like to make love with him before words and deeds would change him forever.

  When they had boosted his immune system with antigens and the engineered leucocytes, and felt it was safe for him to leave the room, she took him to the beach at Viareggio—three weeks before the floats were ready for la festa, three weeks before the crowds would parade themselves down the shadowy King’s Highway with their rubber clubs and strange masks. The city was dead as winter now. She’d had her people clean the beach around the pines for two hundred meters in all directions, testing it for salmonella, typhus, any of the things the beach had become famous for in the past thirty years: all the microbes that might hurt him.

  Her bodyguards remained in the shadows of the trees, like shadows themselves.

  She laid out an old blanket of Yugoslavian cotton embroidered with silver—the one her first husband had given her when they’d begun a life together in the floating city of Taranto, right before the turn of the millennium. The young man could walk now, though unsteadily, the weeks of antibiotic treatments and hydration leaving him weak but happy, his head turning to look at everything, just like a child’s. The scars on his shoulder blades were as pink as the bottoms of putti in a Tiepolo fresco, as the soles of the feet of the babies she could remember a little more clearly now, and no longer seemed to bother him. The eyes were alive with a feeling she could remember feeling, and as she watched him she felt it, too.