Bears Discover Fire

before anyone spoke of it, and weeks before the SETI Commission realized it was the communication we had been promised.

By then it was only a memory. And lucky it was that we all had felt it: otherwise some of us would be spending the next few centuries trying to describe it to those who hadn’t. A new religion, maybe. As it was, most people on the planet were going about their business as if it had never happened, while a few were still trying to figure out what the Brush meant to the children. And the dogs.

“It was a bitter disappointment to Hvarlgen,” said Here’s Johnny. It was late; we were sitting outside, having a whisky, waiting to catch the sunset.

“I know,” I said. “To her, it was an insult. She called it the Brush-off. I can understand her point of view. We are finally contacted by another, maybe the only other life-form in the Universe, but it has nothing to say. No more than a hello, how are you. A wave from a passing ship, she called it.”

“Maybe because it happened to everybody,” Here’s Johnny said.

“I can understand that too,” I said. “We all thought it was going to be just for us.”

One of my unofficial grandsons rode up on a bicycle carrying a turtle. I gave him a dollar for it, and put it into a polyboard box under the trailer with two other turtles. “I pay the kids for the ones they pick up off the road,” I said. “Then after sundown I let them go, away from the highway.”

“Me, I’m more optimistic,” Here’s Johnny said. “Maybe the children who experienced the Brush will grow up different. Maybe smarter or less violent.”

“Or maybe the dogs,” I said.

“What do you think?” he asked. “You were, after all, the first contact.”

“I was just the pattern for the protocol,” I said. “I got the same communication as everyone else, no more and no less. I’m convinced of that. I was just used to, you know, set up the tuning.”

“You weren’t disappointed?”

“I was disappointed that Dr. Kim didn’t get to experience it. But who knows, maybe he did. As for me, I’m an old man. I don’t expect things to mean anything. I just sort of enjoy them. Look there.”

Off to the west, a range of barren peaks was hurling itself between Slab City and the nearest star, painting our trailers with new darkness. The clash of photons set up a barrage of colors in the sky overhead. We watched the sun set in silence; then I got one end of the box and Here’s Johnny got the other, and we dragged it out to a pile of boulders at the edge of the desert and deposited the turtles onto the still-warm sand.

“You do this every night?”

“Why not?” I said. “Maybe it’s turtles all the way down.”

But Here’s Johnny didn’t get the joke. Which goes to show, as Chuck Berry once said, you never can tell.

Afterword

I came to the short story both early and late. In 1964, after the birth of my eldest son, Nathaniel, I wrote a story about a kid born with wings. “George” won honorable mention in a Story magazine contest and made me fifty dollars.

After a couple of false starts, though, I gave up the form entirely.

Then in 1988, after two or three published novels, I wrote “Over Flat Mountain.” It was to me not really a story but the fictional illustration of a conceit—the Appalachians being all rolled up into one mountain; a goof, if you will.

By this time I was a published SF and fantasy author, and when Ellen Datlow asked me if I had ever tried short fiction, I sent her this one with the warning that it was “not an OMNI story.”

She told me she would decide what was and what wasn’t an OMNI story, thank you very much. And bought it.

There’s nothing like an eighteen hundred dollar sale to revive an interest in short fiction.

The rest of the stories in this book were written between 1988 and 1993.

“The Two Janets” is, like “Over Flat Mountain,” the fictional illustration of a conceit that turned into a short story in spite of itself. Owensboro is my hometown.

“They’re Made Out of Meat” has its inspiration in Allen Ginsberg’s reply to an interviewer who kept prattling on about their souls communing. “We’re just meat talking to meat,” the poet corrected him.

“The Coon Suit” came to me in a vivid daydream while driving through Oldham County, Kentucky, twenty-five years ago, and never went away. I find most horror unintentionally funny; this story, which I thought funny, wound up in a horror anthology.

“Cancion” is my attempt at capturing the unaccountable sadness I felt watching street singers in Madrid one Christmas Eve. It is (also unaccountably, perhaps) one of my favorites.

“Carl’s Lawn & Garden” is my hymn to the Garden State.

I thought of “Partial People” while driving over a box.

“Are There Any Questions?” is what you might call a throwaway.

I heard of a circular polluted area in Chicago called “the toxic doughnut” while I was reading Shirley Jackson’s biography; the two influences converged in a story.

“By Permit Only” is still another environmental short story. It was written over Christmas, which probably accounts for its overheated sentimentality.

It’s no coincidence that so many of my environmental stories are short shorts. Save a tree! Even beyond the paper, think how much imaginative timber is wasted on plot, background, character, action, and atmosphere. Better to dispense with them all! Like the lemon cream pie on Saturday Night Live (“No lemon, no cream, just pie”) these short shorts are all story.

I associate the title story with my daughter, Kristen. We were driving on an interstate with beautiful timbered medians when I said, “I just got an idea for a story.” “What is it?” she asked. “All I know for sure is the title,” I said. I agree with Ted Mooney, author of the overlooked SF (well, sort of) masterpiece Easy Travel to Other Planets, that the title is (or can be) the target toward which you shoot the arrow of the story. In this case, a good title, “Bears Discover Fire,” gave me my best shot ever, going on to win the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Sturgeon awards, being published in Japan, Germany, and Russia, and even making a college lit anthology.

“They’re Made Out of Meat” was a Nebula nominee; “Press Ann” was a Hugo nominee; and “Next” won The Chronic Rift TV show’s coveted Round Table award (a plastic device from a pizza box). Adapted for the stage, it was directed and produced at New York’s West Bank Theater by Donna Gentry (along with “They’re Made Out of Meat” and “Next”).

“Two Guys from the Future” is my homage to Classical Time Travel Paradox Light Romantic Comedy.

Years ago in Louisville, right after “George,” I wrote a story called “Mr. Zone” about a man to whom nothing ever happened. The story was never published but the character turned up (as Fox) in “England Underway.”

Sheila Williams of Asimov’s has been kind enough to describe my short fiction as warm and charming.

“Necronauts” is my attempt to undermine that image. Its origin is in a project by artist Wayne Barlowe; he and I once tried to think of a story to illustrate a series of paintings and drawings he called his “Guide to Hell.” The story reaffirms for me how much we all owe to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

“The Message” is more of the old-time mad scientist stuff. Or maybe it’s “The Coon Suit” minus the dogs. Or maybe it’s “Bears” without fire (or hair).

Every once in a while I find myself compelled to revisit the old dominions of hard SF—my home country as a reader, if not a writer. Voyage to the Red Planet was that among my novels; in the stories it is “The Shadow Knows.”

Somehow, these visits home always seem to start with an old fellow returning to space. “Shadow,” my longest story, and “Meat,” one of my shortest, both deal with the same venerable SF theme: first contact.

It was in the midst of writing these stories that I found “George” in the files of my literary ex-mother-in-law