Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 1 March 2013
Page 12
At first, we’re alone there with Little Nino. “I remember what comes next,” he says. “Would you like to see the rest of the dream?”
“Yes, we would.” I let go of Molly’s elbow and take her hand. “We would like that very much.”
Little Nino waves his arms, and figures descend from above, floating down one at a time from the starry sky. They are comic strip women, all of them, descending like wingless angels to land lightly on the wet sand around the rainbow bonfire.
There’s Potpie’s girlfriend, Olives…Ragwood’s wife, Blonder…Li’l Asner’s gal Dandelion Meg…Rick Tracer’s true love Bess Bluehart…Allie Hoop’s cavegirl Moolah…and so many more. Every woman you can think of from the funny pages, every one of them from the sublimely beautiful to the utterly ridiculous. Dozens of them, hundreds of them.
This is it. This is what I’ve been working for; this is why I summoned Molly.
Because this is where the impossible can happen. Here in a child’s dream in a flip-side place where things don’t happen the way they should.
Only here could I do what had to be done.
Hand in hand, Molly and I walk to the fire. We stand before the women, their faces and forms flickering in the dancing rainbow light.
“Oh!” Suddenly, Little Nino runs forward and gazes into the flames. “There is something inside!” Without hesitation, he plunges his arms into the fire.
When he pulls them back out again, unburned, there’s a bundle in his hands. Something wrapped in a comic strip blanket, all black ink and wooly cross-hatched texture.
Grinning, Little Nino turns and offers the bundle to Molly. “Please take this,” he says. “It is for you.”
“From all of us,” says Olives in her nasally voice. “Every last one of us.”
That’s exactly what it took—the combined power of several hundred female icons projected together. Merged with my own hopes and memories in one supreme act of will.
Not sex, but creation nonetheless. The ultimate surrogate motherhood.
Molly peels back the blanket, and a tiny face looks out at her. The face of a comic strip baby boy, eyes big and dark and shining.
This, then, is my secret son, a child conceived in the panelography. A child of pure hope and imagination—an homage to the son we lost.
And perhaps much more than that.
“Think of Henry,” I tell her. “Remember everything you can about him. Every detail.”
She looks at me with tears rolling down her face. “But that won’t…this isn’t…”
“Trust me.” I lift the helmet from her head and kiss her wet cheek. “Think of Henry.”
She casts her eyes up at me with a look of anguished disbelief. I brush the dark hair back behind her ears and shake my head.
“I can’t do it myself,” I say. “I need you. Your half of the memories. Your half of who he is.” I kiss her cheek again. “Please try.”
I watch as she cradles the squirming bundle in her arms. As she closes her eyes and frowns, reaching deep to dredge up those memories.
The comic strip women huddle close, caught up in the moment. I can practically see the pen-and-ink waves of hope ripple out from their exaggerated forms.
Maybe it’s the force of their collective willpower. Maybe it’s the power of the dream we’re in, a dream within a dreamlike realm where human disbelief is suspended. Where comic-strip life works in reverse, so harsh human reality can change direction, too.
Or maybe it’s just her memories and love for him. Our memories and love pouring into a vessel of India ink. Pulling him back from the vanishing point—pulling all three of us back.
Whatever the reason, a new strip debuts tonight, a full-color single-panel above the fold in the Sunday pull-out section. Here’s how we kick off the run:
A mob of famous comic strip women stands around a rainbow bonfire. At panel center, classic child character Little Nino stands on tiptoe, gazing at a swaddled babe in the arms of a woman in a skintight silver spacesuit.
Little Nino says, “Oh my! Look at his eyes! They’re not black anymore!”
The woman in the spacesuit weeps with joy. The square-jawed man beside her bends down to kiss the infant’s forehead.
We can see, in the firelight, that the baby’s eyes are the brightest blue that the four-color printing process will allow.
The caption at the bottom of the panel reads as follows: “Welcome back, Henry!”
Original (First) Publication
Copyright © 2013 by Robert T. Jeschonek
**********
James Patrick Kelly is a multiple Hugo winner (including one for this story), a Nebula winner, and a frequent Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon nominee. His most recent book is Digital Rapture, co-edited with John Kessel.
THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR
by James Patrick Kelly
To the reader of “Think Like A Dinosaur”
I owe this story, which had the cover of the June 1995 Asimov’s, to John Kessel and Tom Godwin. In the early nineties, my friend John Kessel incited a dustup about Godwin’s seminal sf story, “The Cold Equations.” He questioned the rigor of the science in a story that had long been at the center of the hard sf canon, and took a rather dim view of its socio-political subtext. A lively discussion ensued in the pages of the New York Review of Science Fiction. My contribution to the debate was to be a short-short shocker with a working title of “The Cold Equation.” But in the course of researching the story, I had the good fortune to read Kip Thorne’s wonderful Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. By the time I was done with Thorne’s book, I had far more material than I could have possibly crammed into a couple-of-thousand-word short story. The piece grew in size and complexity until I was ready to bring it to the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop, where it got a fiery reception. I remember that we took a break after we were “done” with the critique of my manuscript and people were still arguing about the morality of what Michael Burr had done when we reassembled to begin the next story. I knew then that I had written something that would get under people’s skins.
I am not ashamed to admit that another influence on this story was St*r Tr*k. I have always been disturbed by its transporter technology. Maybe after you read this, you will be, too. But I was not fully conscious of a much more important influence until Barry Malzberg wrote me to ask if I had intended to borrow from Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon. I had only a vague memory of reading this fine novel. When I went to my bookshelf, I found a paperback copy that had been printed in 1960 but that bore the imprint of a used bookstore in Nashua, New Hampshire. I lived in Nashua from 1975 to 1980 and presumably read it then, internalized its ideas and forgot all about the source material. In fact, until I got Barry’s letter, I was rather proud of having come up with a glitzy new sf gizmo all on my own!
This is without doubt my most famous story, and it may well be that the lead of my obit will read something like “This was the guy who wrote ‘Think Like A Dinosaur.’”
I am very cool with that.
Jim
jim@jimkelly.net
***
Think Like A Dinosaur
Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it—naked. She tottered out of the assembler, trying to balance in Tuulen Station’s delicate gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one motion, then eased her onto the float. Three years on another planet had transformed Kamala. She was leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters long and there were four parallel scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps some Gendian’s idea of beautification. But what struck me most was the darting strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock her. It was as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had learned to think like an alien.
“Welcome back.” The float’s whisper rose to a whoosh as I walked it down the hallway.
She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she would have. Lot
s of migrators are devastated when they come out of the assembler; it’s because there is no transition. A few seconds ago Kamala was on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call Epsilon Leo, and now she was here in lunar orbit. She was almost home; her life’s great adventure was over.
“Matthew?” she said.
“Michael.” I couldn’t help but be pleased that she remembered me. After all, she had changed my life.
I’ve guided maybe three hundred migrations—comings and goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri’s is the only quantum scan I’ve ever pirated. I doubt that the dinos care; I suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81 million per mm3. She could play the nagasvaram, a kind of bamboo flute. Her father came from Thana, near Bombay, and her favorite flavor of chewyfrute was watermelon and she’d had five lovers and when she was eleven she had wanted to be a gymnast but instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-nine had volunteered to go to the stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew she could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Silloin translated her into a superluminal signal. It was explained to her many times, what it meant to balance the equation.
I first met her on June 22, 2069. She shuttled over from Lunex’s L1 port and came through our airlock at promptly 10:15, a small, roundish woman with black hair parted in the middle and drawn tight against her skull. They had darkened her skin against Epsilon Leo’s UV; it was the deep blue-black of twilight. She was wearing a striped clingy and velcro slippers to help her get around for the short time she’d be navigating our .2 micrograv.
“Welcome to Tuulen Station.” I smiled and offered my hand. “My name is Michael.” We shook. “I’m supposed to be a sapientologist but I also moonlight as the local guide.”
“Guide?” She nodded distractedly. “Okay.” She peered past me, as if expecting someone else.
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said, “the dinos are in their cages.”
Her eyes got wide as she let her hand slip from mine. “You call the Hanen dinos?”
“Why not?” I laughed. “They call us babies. The weeps, among other things.”
She shook her head in amazement. People who’ve never met a dino tended to romanticize them: the wise and noble reptiles who had mastered superluminal physics and introduced Earth to the wonders of galactic civilization. I doubt Kamala had ever seen a dino play poker or gobble down a screaming rabbit. And she had never argued with Linna, who still wasn’t convinced that humans were psychologically ready to go to the stars.
“Have you eaten?” I gestured down the corridor toward the reception rooms.
“Yes…I mean, no.” She didn’t move. “I am not hungry.”
“Let me guess. You’re too nervous to eat. You’re too nervous to talk, even. You wish I’d just shut up, pop you into the marble, and beam you out. Let’s just get this part the hell over with, eh?”
“I don’t mind the conversation, actually.”
“There you go. Well, Kamala, it is my solemn duty to advise you that there are no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Gend. And no chicken vindaloo. What’s my name again?”
“Michael?”
“See, you’re not that nervous. Not one taco, or a single slice of eggplant pizza. This is your last chance to eat like a human.”
“Okay.” She did not actually smile—she was too busy being brave—but a corner of her mouth twitched. “Actually, I would not mind a cup of tea.”
“Now, tea they’ve got.” She let me guide her toward reception room D; her slippers snicked at the velcro carpet. “Of course, they brew it from lawn clippings.”
“The Gendians don’t keep lawns. They live underground.”
“Refresh my memory.” I kept my hand on her shoulder; beneath the clingy, her muscles were rigid. “Are they the ferrets or the things with the orange bumps?”
“They look nothing like ferrets.”
We popped through the door bubble into reception D, a compact rectangular space with a scatter of low, unthreatening furniture. There was a kitchen station at one end, a closet with a vacuum toilet at the other. The ceiling was blue sky; the long wall showed a live view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline, baking in the late June sun. Kamala had just finished her doctorate at MIT.
I opaqued the door. She perched on the edge of a couch like a wren, ready to flit away.
While I was making her tea, my fingernail screen flashed. I answered it and a tiny Silloin came up in discreet mode. She didn’t look at me; she was too busy watching arrays in the control room. =A problem,= her voice buzzed in my earstone, =most negligible, really. But we will have to void the last two from today’s schedule. Save them at Lunex until first shift tomorrow. Can this one be kept for an hour?=
“Sure,” I said. “Kamala, would you like to meet a Hanen?” I transferred Silloin to a dino-sized window on the wall. “Silloin, this is Kamala Shastri. Silloin is the one who actually runs things. I’m just the doorman.”
Silloin looked through the window with her near eye, then swung around and peered at Kamala with her other. She was short for a dino, just over a meter tall, but she had an enormous head that teetered on her neck like a watermelon balancing on a grapefruit. She must have just oiled herself because her silver scales shone. =Kamala, you will accept my happiest intentions for you?= She raised her left hand, spreading the skinny digits to expose dark crescents of vestigial webbing.
“Of course, I…”
=And you will permit us to render you this translation?=
She straightened. “Yes.”
=Have you questions?=
I’m sure she had several hundred, but at this point was probably too scared to ask. While she hesitated, I broke in. “Which came first, the lizard or the egg?”
Silloin ignored me. =It will be excellent for you to begin when?=
“She’s just having a little tea.” I said, handing her the cup. “I’ll bring her along when she’s done. Say an hour?”
Kamala squirmed on couch. “No, really, it will not take me…”
Silloin showed us her teeth, several of which were as long as piano keys. =That would be most appropriate, Michael.= She closed; a gull flew through the space where her window had been.
“Why did you do that?” Kamala’s voice was sharp.
“Because it says here that you have to wait your turn. You’re not the only migrator we’re sending this morning.” This was a lie, of course; we had had to cut the schedule because Jodi Latchaw, the other sapientologist assigned to Tuulen, was at the University of Hipparchus presenting our paper on the Hanen concept of identity. “Don’t worry, I’ll make the time fly.”
For a moment, we looked at each other. I could have laid down an hour’s worth of patter; I’d done that often enough. Or I could have drawn her out on why she was going: no doubt she had a blind grandma or second cousin just waiting for her to bring home those artificial eyes, not to mention potential spin-offs which could well end tuberculosis, famine and premature ejaculation, blah, blah, blah. Or I could have just left her alone in the room to read the wall. The trick was guessing how spooked she really was.
“Tell me a secret,” I said.
“What?”
“A secret, you know, something no one else knows.”
She stared as if I’d just fallen off Mars.
“Look, in a little while you’re going some place that’s what…three hundred and ten light years away? You’re scheduled to stay for three years. By the time you come back, I could easily be rich, famous and elsewhere; we’ll probably never see each other again. So what have you got to lose? I promise not to tell.”
She leaned back on the couch, and settled the cup in her lap. “This is another test, right? After everything
they have put me through, they still have not decided whether to send me.”
“Oh no, in a couple of hours you’ll be cracking nuts with ferrets in some dark Gendian burrow. This is just me, talking.”
“You are crazy.”
“Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It’s from the Greek: logos meaning word, mania meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love to chat is all. Tell you what, I’ll go first. If my secret isn’t juicy enough, you don’t have to tell me anything.”
Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that whatever she was worrying about at the moment, it wasn’t being swallowed by the big blue marble.
“I was brought up Catholic,” I said, settling onto a chair in front of her. “I’m not anymore, but that’s not the secret. My parents sent me to Mary, Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run by a couple of old priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer. Father Tom taught physics, which I got a “D” in, mostly because he talked like he had walnuts in his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught theology and had all the warmth of a marble pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.
“One night, just two weeks before my graduation, Father Tom and Mama Moogoo went out in their Chevy Minimus for ice cream. On the way home, Mama Moogoo pushed a yellow light and got broadsided by an ambulance. Like I said, she was old, a hundred and twenty something; they should’ve lifted her license back in the ’50s. She was killed instantly. Father Tom died in the hospital.
“Of course, we were all supposed to feel sorry for them and I guess I did a little, but I never really liked either of them and I resented the way their deaths had screwed things up for my class. So I was more annoyed than sorry, but then I also had this edge of guilt for being so uncharitable. Maybe you’d have to grow up Catholic to understand that. Anyway, the day after it happened they called an assembly in the gym and we were all there squirming on the bleachers and the cardinal himself telepresented a sermon. He kept trying to comfort us, like it had been our parents that had died. When I made a joke about it to the kid next to me, I got caught and spent the last week of my senior year with an in-school suspension.”