The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (47 page)

I was the one,
she adds,
who got the Mayor to call you. He’s not one of us. There are only five. Jacob’s dad was the sixth. We had to get you here. I’m sorry.
 

He’s holding her hands now and, though her skin should bother him, it doesn’t. She’s still the woman he knows, even if she’s something else. He nods. She steps toward him, puts her arms around him, her pupilless eyes only a few inches from his, and hugs him, really hugs him. It feels good. He knows what they must be feeling—Susan, Jacob, the doctor, and the others—alone here, not knowing what’s going to happen to them, bodies not really all that different from his.
After all, we come from the same galactic seed, don’t we?
a voice says—the one that always talks like this. 

“I’m glad you didn’t go,” she says in his ear, this time with words, and he’s hugging her back now—a real, honest-to-goodness hug between two beings who’ve become good friends and who may yet, God and anatomy willing, become lovers. 

As they hug, we see a tattoo on her forearm—a very patriotic eagle clutching arrows—something that wasn’t there a few days ago, something she’s put there for him, and this tells us that whatever else she might be feeling, whatever else she might be, she loves him—and isn’t that what really matters in a universe or a movie like this one? 

We fade to blue sky. 

Or stars. 

Or a newborn baby. 

Or whatever else feels right. 

Hero, The Movie 

Story Notes 

This story bears a striking resemblance to an absurdly long feature-film “treatment” which Hollywood producer Gale Anne Hurd (
The Terminator, Armageddon,
others) requested in 1991 but didn’t buy because, she confessed, of its “romance element.” Ms. Hurd had read the novel version of “Dream Baby,” had liked it for its kickass female lead and ESP elements, but had in development at that same time another “psychic warrior” project; but she kindly invited me to pitch ideas, which I did one afternoon after two solid months of preparation (including artwork and a lot of biographical research on her). I pitched six ideas and Ms. Hurd and her staff were friendly as can be. Two of the ideas were too big-budget for her; two would have been of interest to her a few years earlier, she said; and two she indeed liked and wanted to see treatments for. “Hero” was the one I delivered, but because life at the time had its distractions (all worthy of at least a short story or two, though I doubt they’ll ever be written), I never delivered a rewrite to her that replaced the “romance” with “road adventures,” which is what she said she wanted. As a consequence, “Hero” was free to appear fourteen years later—with the “romance element” heightened (so there!) and other changes made—in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
One reviewer has questioned the wisdom of human beings hooking up with aliens—“even out of love”—but most readers, bless their romantic bones, seem not to have a problem with it, for which I am grateful.
 

Afterword: 

The Arc of Circumstance 

My first contact with Bruce McAllister was in 1965 when I was at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency writing critique-reports to unpublished writers, and Bruce was sending stories there. “Close but not quite right for the market, Mr. McAllister. Good imagery, powerful insight, but ragged plotting, and, say, what about those transitions?” Bruce, nineteen years old and the author of a story which had appeared, when he was seventeen, in Judy Merril’s “best science fiction” annual, persisted, although not with the agenting services of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. (The story, “The Faces Outside,” was written when the lad was sixteen. This may not be the record for precocity in modern science fiction—Larry Brody and a couple of others are, I think, competitive—but it is remarkably close.) 

Next, and in a flurry, he sold stories to Ed Ferman at
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
more stories to Fred Pohl at
if
and
Galaxy,
and a story, “The Big Boy,” to me in early 1968 during my own brief tenure at that tortured monument to science fiction,
Fantastic Stories.
He was twenty-two then. Still a promising kid. His science fiction was traditional in the way, say, that J. G. Ballard’s
New Worlds
fiction at the time was not, but it had other than clanking robots and ballistics as its major concern. Furthermore, this was a guy who, I felt sure, had clearly read Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” in
New Worlds
and knew exactly what it was about. 

We fell into correspondence. People did get into a different kind of correspondence in those days, still bereft of personal computers and e-mail. Poised effusions, projections of writerly persona managed for the typewriter, and the concept of a kind of evanescent permanence. All of seven years older than this redheaded California kid, I cast myself as the Old Hack, proceeded to refashion Rilke’s
Letters To a Young Poet
as an effusion for the category markets. In fact, called myself in our correspondence “the Old Hack.” The Redheaded Kid fell kindly and fully into the exchange, seeking a mentor’s advice. “Get out now,” the Old Hack advised him. Neither of us quite followed that advice. 

Chronology ground ahead. I was discharged, and a good thing too, from the editorship of
Fantastic Stories.
Bruce completed his BA and MFA degrees in creative writing (his master’s thesis, a revolution at the time, was a science fiction novel,
Humanity Prime,
which became one of Terry Carr’s final group of “Ace SF Specials”) and embarked upon an academic career, even as I wallowed in 60,000-word, three-week wonders and the joys of writing and publishing first drafts to sustain a mortgage, gardener, nursery school bus service, and all of the other insane accoutrements of insane suburban life. Our correspondence flourished as I furnished Bruce a diary of the writing life conducted in pursuit of middle-class anonymity. 

“Well,” he wrote in a letter I misplaced but never forgot, “I’d like to try to be nothing other than a writer, but I now see it is impossible. I simply cannot write fast enough to sustain myself financially.” Moved by the savagery of my example, Bruce clutched his MFA, then regarded by academe as a terminal degree for teaching, and entered fully upon an academic career, becoming eventually director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Redlands. (He invited me twice, in 1978 and 1985, to be a one-week Writer in Residence. Lovely landscape. The desert into which I drove at dawn on November 12, 1978, made me gasp. Ah, the wonders, as Buddy Glass would write, of the little traveling whore’s cubicle of the Writer in Residence.) 

Prior to the Writer in Residence business Bruce and I had to meet; and so we did in the Acme Supermarket parking lot in 1972, he distracted and near-unraveling from the effects of a 3000-mile cross-country drive; his wife at the time, like most writers’ wives, holding on gamely to the shreds of patience. We got along just as well in direct engagement. (Why else would he have twice elected me Writer in Residence?) We remain friends at this moment of transcription, forty years of family secrets and whispers behind. I think I am responsible (in fact, I know I am) for the inclusion of his great novelette “Dream Baby” in Jack Dann and Jeanne Van Buren Dann’s signal anthology
In the Field of Fire.
In 1987 this story would have sold anywhere, but the Danns’ anthology of stories on the truth of the Vietnam experience was the first and right place to send it, and so it was there. Was transmogrified into the equally great novel of the same title a couple of years later. 

All these words about the Redheaded Kid, and until the last sentences above I have managed to essentially elide mention of his work. Old writers are thieves together; they tend to be this way: I have read Richard Ford’s essay on Tobias Woolf and Raymond Carver, which tells what great old friends they were (and don’t you wish you too were?) and has nothing else to say; I have read Norman Mailer’s well-known essay from
Advertisements for Myself
on the “Talent in the Room,” which says much of personality and little of work (he did call Salinger “the greatest mind who never graduated from prep school”), and I have always found this kind of thing annoying. “I
know
you’re Chevy Chase and I am not,” I want to bellow at the memoirist. “Why not tell me something useful and objective?” 

Well, we can try. Clouds of love and association obscure objectivity; it is hard to separate what I know of Bruce and the places we have shared from what I know of his work. The work is extraordinary. “Dream Baby” is certainly the best work of short fiction published
anywhere
in 1987 (there might be a masterpiece in
Epoch
or
The North American Review
which got by me, but this it not likely). His work starting in the period of the mid-eighties found an entirely new level; there really are no stories in the lexicon like that Vietnam story or “The Ark” or “The Girl Who Loved Animals.” They burn the page.
Dream Baby
is as good a novel as its origination is a novelette but it is an essential transmogrification; the novelette is absolutely individual, shattering in its encompassing fear and force. 

A friend of mine, Allan Kleinberger—also an editor at the Scott Meredith Agency but of a different generation (this was in 1987)—read “Dream Baby,” the novelette, in manuscript and said, “This is a brilliant science fiction story, top of the genre. But it is a tribute to this story to say that the opening section, which is objective realism, is so powerful, so overwhelming, that when the science fiction kicks in somewhere around the seventh page it is something of a declension, even though it is superb. I can’t think of any greater praise.” Echoes here of Kingsley Amis’s quote: “If it’s good it isn’t sf!”—but “Dream Baby” is nothing if not sf, though point taken. 

With Harry Harrison, I find it a pleasure to be an appurtenance to this collection. This is —with Alfred Bester and James Tiptree and what a Trinity!—the best short story writer to ever work within the defined genre of science fiction. And at sixty he is writing as well as ever. The next decade will be a series of shocks, aftershocks, thunderbolts: an exacerbated astonishment. 

Barry Malzberg 

Teaneck, New Jersey 

November 2006 

Bruce McAllister is best known for his science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction. His short stories have appeared in literary quarterlies, national magazines, theme anthologies, 'year's best' anthologies and college readers; won awards from
Glimmer Train
magazine and the National Endowment for the Arts; and been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards. He is the author of two novels,
Humanity Prime
and
Dream Baby,
 with a third,
The Village Sang to the Sea,
 to appear in 2012. He lives in southern California with his wife, choreographer Amelie Hunter, and is a full-time writer, writing coach and book and screenplay consultant.

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