The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (20 page)

“Can you come up?” he asked. 

“Sure, Stu. When?” 

“Soon as you can?” 

I could hear it even more clearly now—the illness, whatever it was. I heard no sadness in the voice, though, just a body getting ready to leave, and a soul nodding its consent. He was seventy-nine years old, after all; he’d lived a good life; his daughter was grown and married and happy; and he didn’t want to outlive his wife. 

When I got there, it was evening, and he looked a hundred years old. His hair was gone and his eyes watered constantly, but he wasn’t going to stop grinning. He’d hold onto that up to the last, I knew. 

“I want to show you one last thing,” he said. 

I didn’t like that. He was just being practical, I knew, but still. . . . 

He led me to his little shed in the backyard, unlocked the door, and waved me in. The overhead light flicked on automatically, and I could see his workbench and the two identical objects on it. They looked like aluminum Frisbees, but were thicker, each on its own square metal box. With an unsteady step to the workbench, he flipped a switch and light shot from a hole in the top of each Frisbee. The two blue beams, no bigger around than fishing rods, looked thick enough to touch. The ceiling stopped them, but you could tell that if they’d been outside in the night the light would have kept going and going. 

“The light’s not really the main thing,” he was saying, his voice tired and pretty serious. “It’s a vehicle—a quantum shuttle, you might say. It helps carry the
real
signal.” 

I didn’t know what to say. I thought I knew what they might be for, but the idea was totally crazy. 

“Do you want to take them outside?” I asked. 

“No,” he said. “The Navy doesn’t want me to operate them outside.” 

I waited. The beams bore into the wooden roof of the shed, and for a moment I thought they might, like lasers in a science fiction movie, burn through it. Were they my inventions, I’d certainly want them to. I’d be angry enough—at the Navy, the Pentagon—to want them to burn through, even cause a ruckus with jets or satellites, though of course I wouldn’t want anyone hurt. But that was just the sixties kid in me, the one still mad at the government. 

“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 more 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.