Vanishing Acts: A Science Fiction Anthology Read online

  To my friends in Albuquerque, who lit the fire

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  LISTENING TO BRAHMS

  THE RIFT

  1. Ron Vignone

  2. Ty Brown

  3. Dr. Alex Wilson

  4. Ralph Read

  5. Amy Burton

  6. The Danes

  THE GIRL WHO LOVED ANIMALS

  SUNFLOWERS

  TENEBRIO

  DANCE OF THE YELLOW-BREASTED LUDDITES

  BLESSED EVENT

  FADED ROSES

  LINKS

  CHIMERA 8

  BITE THE HAND

  THE THING ABOUT BENNY

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen,” day 3. En route from the airport.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen,” day 3. Dinner.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen,” day 4. UP&L offices.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen,” day 4. Dinner.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen,” day 5. UP&L offices.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen,” day 5. Wandering the streets.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 32: “1 Have a Dream.” day 2. Agnetha’s grave.

  FAST GLACIERS

  23-1-02

  4-2-02

  16-3-02

  12-5-02

  29-7-02

  NOW LET US SLEEP

  SEVENTY-TWO LETTERS

  ENDANGERED SPECIES

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank David Hartwell and Jim Minz

  for being behind this book.

  INTRODUCTION

  Several of the anthologies I’ve edited have had their origins during conversations with friends about overlooked stories—stories that we felt should have attracted more attention upon their first publication or that deserved reprinting. Vanishing Acts began that way. A few years ago, while in Albuquerque, New Mexico, some friends and I were discussing Suzy McKee Charnas’s work and I mentioned one of my favorite of her stories, “Listening to Brahms”—originally published in Omni and a subsequent Nebula nominee, but rarely reprinted. The story is about a lizard race that takes in the few survivors of the late great planet Earth and how those humans influence an entire culture. It’s also about the healing power of music. It is one of very few stories that gives me a lump in my throat no matter how many times I read it. It prompted me to bring up two other stories I consider underappreciated classics—Bruce McAllister’s “The Girl Who Loved Animals,” about a woman who chooses to act as birth mother for an embryo of an endangered species and the emotions and ethical considerations this selfless act engenders. The other was Avram Davidson’s “Now Let Us Sleep,” about the last natives of a colonized planet. I decided then and there that I wanted to create a mostly original anthology that would emanate from these three stories. As I was unaware of any other recent science fiction anthology with the theme of endangered species, I hoped the theme would spark author enthusiasm—it did.

  One might assume that an anthology about extinction would be depressing. Of course, some of the stories are heartbreaking and some are downbeat but there are also healthy doses of exuberance, adventure, and even twinges of humor in this book. I hope that the stories, rather than creating a feeling of hopelessness in the reader, will instead stir a sense of anger and indignation and responsibility. And even more, perhaps spur at least a few readers into doing something to prevent endangered species from becoming extinct species like some of those in this book.

  I find polemic in fiction boring. The stories that most influence are the gentle persuaders. I don’t mean gentle stories, but those that are so engrossing and well-told that the reader doesn’t realize they’ve been poleaxed until after the story is done. I’ve tried to present a variety of stories; most are science fiction, but each goes at the subject from different angles, different tones, different points of view. Some are not meant to be taken seriously. You’ll know them when you read them.

  The range of species written about by the contributors runs the gamut from insects and buffalo and humans to aliens and plants and creatures that have never existed in our universe—and imaginary genetically-engineered creatures that perhaps shouldn’t.

  For information contact: The Endangered Species Coalition, http://www.stopextinction.org or write to: [email protected] or 1101 14th Street, NW, Suite 1200, Washington, D.C. 20005. (202) 682-9400, fax: (202) 682-1331

  Suzy McKee Charnas, a born and bred New Yorker, has lived with her husband in New Mexico for the past thirty years. She has taught high school and university classes and still gladly does teaching or speaking engagements in the areas of writing and SF. Her first novel, Walk to the End of the World (1974), was a John VV. Campbell Award finalist. The Conqueror’s Child, the fourth book of the series begun with Walk, completed that extensive fiction project in 1999. Various SF and fantasy books and stories have won her the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Mythopoeic Society’s Award for young-adult fantasy. She ventured into theater by turning her prize-winning novella “Unicorn Tapestry” into a play, first staged at the MagicTheatre in San Francisco in 1991. She has recently revised the lyrics and written several new songs for the musical Nosferatu, by British composer Bernard J. Taylor.

  She says of “Listening to Brahms” that “this is the only story I have written that was first told to me in a dream on the sunny terrace of a seaside restaurant by a human-sized lizard sitting across the table from me. I did not remember a word this creature had said when I woke up, but a few days later I sat down and wrote this story in a sustained burst of clear energy. The original germ of ‘Brahms’ had been a scrap of conversation overheard at a concert in Santa Fe; unable to come up with the fictional context that I knew lurked behind this brief dialog, I had written down the lines and stuck them in a drawer to ripen. It was months later that the lizard-person narrated the story itself to me in my sleep. I do not know what all this means with regard to a) the creative process, b) astral travel to alien planets and/or restaurants, or c) the actual future of the human species. Maybe when you’ve read the story, you can tell me.”

  LISTENING TO BRAHMS

  SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS

  Entry 1: They had already woken up Chandler and Ross. They did me third. I was supposed to be up first so I could check the data on the rest of our crew during their cold sleep, but how would a bunch of aliens know that?

  Our ship is full of creatures with peculiar eyes and wrinkled skin covered with tiny scales, a lot like lizards walking around on their hind legs. Their skins are grayish or greenish or even bluish sometimes. They have naked-looking faces—no hair—with features that seem polished smooth. The first ones I met had wigs on, and they wore evening clothes and watered-silk sashes with medals. I was too numb-brained to laugh, and now I don’t feel like it. They all switched to jumpsuits once the formalities were over. I keep waiting for them to unzip their jumpsuits and then their lizard suits and climb out, regular human beings. I keep waiting for the joke to be over.

  They speak English, some with accents, some not. They have breathy voices and talk very softly to us. That may be because of what they have to say. They say Earth burned itself up, which is why we never got our wake-up signal and were still in the freezer when they found us. Chandler believes them. Ross doesn’t. I won’t know what the others think until they’re unfrozen.

  I sit looking through the view plate at Earth, such as it is. I know what the lizards say is true, but I don’t think I really beli
eve it. I think mostly that I’m dead or having a terrible dream.

  Entry 2: Steinbrunner killed himself (despite their best efforts to prevent anything like that, the lizards say). Sue Anne Beamish, fifth to be thawed, won’t talk to anybody. She grits her teeth all the time. I can hear them grinding whenever she’s around. It’s very annoying.

  The lead lizard’s name is Captain Midnight. He says he knows it’s not the most appropriate name for a space-flight commander, but he likes the sound of it.

  It seems that on their home planet the lizards have been fielding our various Earth transmissions, both radio and TV, and they borrow freely from what they’ve found there. They are given native names, but if they feel like it later they take Earth-type names instead. Those on Captain Midnight’s ship all have Earth-type names. Luckily the names are pretty memorable, because I can’t tell one alien from another except by the name badges they wear on their jumpsuits. I look at them sometimes and I wonder if I’m crazy. Can’t afford to be, not if I’ve got to deal on a daily basis with things that look as if they walked out of a Walt Disney cartoon feature.

  They revive us one by one and try to make sure nobody else cuts their wrists like Steinbrunner. He cut the long way, that can’t be fixed.

  I look out the viewplate at what’s left of the earth and let the talk slide over me. We can’t raise anything from down there. I can’t raise anything inside me either. I can only look and look and let the talk slide over me. Could I be dead after all? I feel dead.

  Entry 3: Captain Midnight says now that we’re all up he would be honored beyond expression if we would consent to come back to Kondra with him and his crew in their ship. Kondra is their name for their world. Chu says she’s worked out where and what it is in our terms, and she keeps trying to show me on the star charts. I don’t look; I don’t care. I came up here to do studies on cryogenic nutrition in space, not to look at star charts.

  It doesn’t matter what I came up here to do. Earth is a moon with a moon now. Nutrition doesn’t mean anything, not in connection with anything human. There’s nothing to nourish. There’s just this airless rock, like all the other airless rocks rolling around in space.

  I took the data the machines recorded about us while we slept, and I junked it. Chu says I did a lot of damage to some of our equipment in the process. I didn’t set out to do that, but it felt good, or something like good, to go on from wiping out information to smashing metal. I’ve assured everybody that I won’t freak out like that again. It doesn’t accomplish anything, and I felt foolish afterward. I’m not sure they believe me. I’m not sure I believe my own promise.

  Morris and Myers say they won’t go with the Kondrai. They say they want to stay here in our vessel just in case something happens down there or in case some other space mission survived and shows up looking for whatever’s left, which is probably only us.

  Captain Midnight says they can rig a beacon system on our craft to attract anybody who does come around and let them know where we’ve gone. I can tell the lizards are not going to let Morris and Myers stay here and die.

  They say, the Kondrai do, that they didn’t actually come here for us. After several generations of receiving and enjoying Earth’s transmissions, Kondran authorities decided to borrow a ship from a neighboring world and send Earth an embassy from Kondra, a mission of goodwill.

  First contact at last, and there’s nobody here but the seven of us. Tough on the Kondrai. They expected to find a whole worldful of us, glued to our screens and speakers. Tough shit all around.

  I have dreams so terrible there are no words.

  Entry 4: There’s nothing for us to do on the Kondran ship, which is soft and leathery inside its alloy shell. I have long talks with Walter Drake, who is head of the mission. Walter Drake is female, I think. Walter Duck.

  If I can make a joke, does that mean I’m crazy?

  It took me a while to figure out what was wrong with the name. Then I said, “Look, it’s Sir Walter Raleigh or Sir Francis Drake.”

  She said, “But we don’t always just copy. I have chosen to commemorate two great voyagers.”

  I said, “And they were both males.”

  She said, “That’s why I dropped the Sir.”

  Afterward I can’t believe these conversations. I resent the end of the world—my world, going on as a bad joke with Edgar Rice Burroughs aliens.

  Myers and Morris play chess with each other all day and won’t talk to anybody. Most of us don’t like to talk to each other right now. We can’t look in each other’s eyes, for some reason. There’s an excuse in the case of not looking the lizards in the eyes. They have this nictitating membrane. It’s unsettling to look at that.

  All the lizards speak English and at least one other Earth language. Walter Drake says there are several native languages on Kondra, but they aren’t spoken in the population centers anymore. Kondran culture, in its several major branches, is very old. It was once greater and more complex than our own, she says, but then it got simple again, and the population began to drop. The whole species was, in effect, beginning to close down. When our signals were first picked up, something else began to happen: a growing trend toward population increase and a young generation fascinated by Earth culture. The older Kondrai, who had gone back to living like their ancestors in the desert, didn’t object. They said fine, let the youngsters do as they choose as long as they let the oldsters do likewise.

  I had to walk away when Walter Drake told me about this. It started me thinking about my own people I left back on Earth, all dead now. I won’t put their names down. I was crying. Now I’ve stopped, and I don’t want to start again. It makes my eyes hurt.

  Walter Drake brought me some tapes of music that they’ve recorded from our broadcasts. They collect our signals, everything they can, through something they call the Retrieval Project. They reconstruct the broadcasts and record them and store the recordings in a huge library for study. Our classical music has a great following there.

  I’ve been listening to some Bach partitas. My mother played the piano. She sometimes played Bach.

  Entry 5: Sibelius, Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 43; Tchaikovsky, Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33; Rachmaninoff, Symphonic Dances, Op. 45; Mozart, Clarinet Quintet in A major, K581; Sibelius, Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 43; Sibelius, Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 43.

  Entry 6: Chandler is alive, Ross is alive, Beamish is alive, Chu is alive, Morris is alive, Myers is alive, and I am alive. But that doesn’t count. I mean I can’t count it. Up. To mean anything. Why are we alive?

  Entry 7: Myers swallowed a chess piece. The lizards operated on him somehow and saved his life.

  Entry 8: Woke up from a dream wondering if maybe we did die in our ship and my “waking life” in the Kondran ship is really just some kind of after-death hallucination. Suppose I died, suppose we all actually died at the same moment Earth died? It wouldn’t make any difference. Earth’s people are all dead and someplace else or nowhere, but we are here. We are separate.

  They’re in contact with their home planet all the time. Chu is fascinated by their communications technology, which is wild, she says. Skips over time or folds up space—I don’t know, I’m just a nutrition expert. Apparently on Kondra now they are making up their own human-style names instead of lifting them ready-made. (Walter Drake was a pioneer in this, I might point out.) Captain Midnight has changed his name. He is henceforth to be known as Vernon Zeno Ellerman.

  Bruckner and Mahler symphonies, over and over, fill a lot of time. Walter Drake says she is going to get me some fresh music, though I haven’t asked for any.

  Entry 9: Beamish came and had a talk with me. She looked fierce.

  “Listen, Flynn,” she said, “we’re not going to give up.”

  “Give up what?” I said.

  “Don’t be so obtuse,” she said between her teeth. “The human race isn’t ended as long as even a handful of us are still alive and kicking.”

  I am alive, though I don’t
know why (I now honestly do not recall the exact nature of the experiments I was onboard our craft to conduct). I’m not sure I’m kicking, and I told her so.

  She grinned and patted my knee. “Don’t worry about it, Flynn. I don’t mean you should take up where you left off with Lily Chu.” That happened back in training. I didn’t even remember it until Beamish said this. “Nobody’s capable right now, which is just as well. Besides, the women in this group are not going to be anybody’s goddamn brood mares, science-fiction traditions to the contrary.”

  “Oh,” I said. I think.

  She went on to say that the Kondrai have or can borrow the technology to grow children for us in vitro. All we have to do is furnish the raw materials.

  I said fine. I had developed another terrible headache. I’ve been having headaches lately.

  After she left I tried some music. Walter Drake got me Boris Godunov, but I can’t listen to it. I can’t listen to anything with people’s voices. I don’t know how to tell this to Walter Drake. Don’t want to tell her. It’s none of her business anyhow.

  Entry 10: Chu and Morris are sleeping together. So much for Beamish’s theory that nobody is capable. With Myers not up to playing chess yet, I guess Morris had to find something to do.

  Chu said to me, “I’m sorry, Michael.”

  I felt this little, far-off sputtering like anger somewhere deep down, and then it went out. “That’s okay,” I said. And it is.

  Chandler has been spending all his time in the communications cell of the ship with another lizard, one with a French name that I can’t remember. Chandler tells us he’s learning a lot about Kondran life. I tune him out when he talks like this. I never go to the communications cell. The whole thing gives me a headache. Everything gives me a headache except music.

  Entry 11: I was sure it would be like landing in some kind of imitation world, a hodgepodge of phony bits and pieces copied from Earth. That’s why I wouldn’t go out for two K-days after we landed.