Hugo awards the short st.., p.137
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 137
"I've been up against that all my life. I have something in my head that just won't quit. It's a way I have of asking the next question: why is so-and-so the way it is? Why can't it be such-and-such instead? There is always another question to be asked about anything or any situation especially you shouldn't quit when you like an answer because there's always another one after it. And we live in a world where people just don't want to ask the next question!
"I've been paid all my stomach will take for things people won't use and if I'm mad all the time, it's really my fault—I admit it—because I just can't stop asking that next question and coming up with answers. There are a half-dozen real block-busters in that lab that nobody will ever see and half a hundred more in my head. But what can you do in a world where people would rather kill each other in a desert, even when they're shown it can turn green and bloom—where they'll fall all over themselves to pour billions into developing a new oil strike when it's been proved over and over again that the fossil fuels will kill us all? Yes, I'm angry. Shouldn't I be?"
She let the echoes of his voice swirl around the court and out through the hole in the top of the atrium and waited a little longer to let him know he was here with her and not beside himself and his fury. He grinned at her sheepishly when he came to this.
And she said, "Maybe you're asking the next question instead of asking the right question. I think people who live by wise old sayings are trying not to think—but I know one worth paying some attention to. It's this. If you ask a question the right way, you've just given the answer." She went on, "I mean, if you put your hand on a hot stove you might ask yourself, how can I stop my hand from burning? And the answer is pretty clear, isn't it? If the world keeps rejecting what you have to give—there's some way of asking why that contains the answer."
"It's a simple answer," he said shortly. "People are stupid."
"That isn't the answer and you know it," she said.
"What is?"
"Oh, I can't tell you that! All I know is that the way you do something, where people are concerned, is more important than what you do. If you want results, I mean you already know how to get what you want with the tree, don't you?"
"I'll be damned."
"People are living, growing things, too. I don't know a hundredth part of what you do about bonsai but I do know this—when you start one, it isn't often the strong straight healthy ones you take. It's the twisted sick ones that can be made the most beautiful. When you get to shaping humanity, you might remember that."
"Of all the—I don't know whether to laugh in your face or punch you right in the mouth!"
She rose. He hadn't realized she was quite this tall.
"I'd better go."
"Come on now. You know a figure of speech when you hear one."
"Oh, I didn't feel threatened. But—I'd better go, all the same."
Shrewdly he asked her, "Are you afraid to ask the next question?"
"Terrified."
"Ask it anyway."
"No."
"Then I'll do it for you. You said I was angry and afraid. You want to know what I'm afraid of."
"Yes."
"You. I am scared to death of you."
"Are you really?"
"You have a way of provoking honesty," he said with some difficulty. "I'll say what I know you're thinking: I'm afraid of any close human relationship. I'm afraid of something I can't take apart with a screwdriver or a mass spectroscope or a table of cosines and tangents. I don't know how to handle it."
His voice was jocular but his hands were shaking.
"You do it by watering one side," she said softly, "or by turning it just so in the sun. You handle it as if it were a living thing, like a species or a woman or a bonsai. It will be what you want it to be if you let it be itself and take the time and the care."
"I think," he said, "that you are making me some kind of offer. Why?"
"Sitting there most of the night," she said, "I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted trees ever made bonsai out of one another?"
"What's your name?" he asked her.
THE BEAR WITH THE KNOT IN HIS TAIL
Stephen Tall
We swept in comfortable wide orbit around Earth, thirty thousand miles beyond the moon. Cap'n Jules Griffin kept us in the moon shadow, the umbra, a pleasanter location in which to drift and listen than out in the raw yellow radiance of Sol. Only a few degrees away from the moon's vast shadowy disk the full Earth hung like a color plate, blue, cloud-shrouded, the most majestic object I've ever seen from space.
And I've been around. We all have. It's our job.
Ultraspan made us possible. A discovery that must have been an accident—or almost. How can matter move faster than energy? Or can it? Ultraspan eliminates time; so our position in space can be anything Cap'n Jules wills it to be. Not that he understands what he does. Especially not that. He knows every pulse of the timonium engines that move us in finite space, but Ultraspan he takes on faith. Like religion. Like magic. Like the things that happen in dreams.
We've tested it. For the past nine years the research ship Stardust has done with ease what was not possible before Willoughby's Hypothesis, that strange variant of an Einsteinian concept that divorces space from time. You don't know what I'm talking about? Neither do I—but it works. Harnessed, implemented, it's Ultraspan.
Life aboard the Stardust is comfortable, but for me it's not the good life. I really come alive when we drop in, break out of orbit, and drift down to the surface of some unknown world, some planet that from space shows that it will tolerate us long enough for a look-see. And I did say drift down. The searing outpourings of combustion energy that first took us into and out of space are alla part of our history now. Gravity is no longer a problem. If the conditions required it, Cap'n Jules could bring our fifteen-hundred-foot laboratory-home down over any planet surface at ten miles an hour. We have conquered the attraction of mass for mass.
"Dreaming, Roscoe?"
I don't like to be touched or backslapped, but the hand on my shoulder now was a notable exception to that. Especially when the owner slipped around my easy chair and plumped her luscious self into my lap. I put my arms around her, and we both sat watching the wide screen on which the Earth hung in misty glory.
"The Old Homestead," Lindy said. "If I can just see it once in a while, like now, I'm perfectly content with space. But that's the ultimate, that beautiful blue-green marble out there. We can search all our lives and we'll never find anything like it."
"It's a point of view," I admitted. "Statistically, though, probably not defensible. Somewhere in our galaxy of hundreds of millions of stars, with space only knows how many planets around them, the Earth has to have a twin. We're still babes in the cosmic woods, and already we've come close. You haven't—say you haven't!—forgotten Cyrene?"
She hadn't forgotten. How could she? And the star Cyrene was a Sol-type sun. Its yellow rays on the surface of its fourth planet could easily have been mistaken for Sol's rays. But Planet Four had had a strange and simple ecology, and life forms so different that they had made me famous. Yes, I'm that Kissinger. A Different Evolutionary System, by Roscoe Kissinger. The lettuce-cube-mill-wheel food chain. So now when I'm on Earth, I have to make speeches. And I don't much like to speak. I'm a field ecologist. I like to do.
But that's not why Lindy remembered Planet Four. It was there, after many invitations, that she finally decided that to be Mrs. Kissinger might be a good thing. Maybe it was the homelike atmosphere. For Planet Four of the star Cyrene was Earthlike.
Lindy twisted in my lap and faced me, her classic features, green eyes, and red lips not six inches from my more or less Neanderthal visage. So I did what any man in the galaxy would have done, and when I had finished she was properly breathless.
"Necking again!" Pegleg Williams growled. He came rolling across the lounge, his slight limp accentuated. He does that when he wants to attract attention. He took the chair next ours.
"Don't you two ever fight, like normal couples? You'll both develop space diabetes, living in a sea of sugar like you do."
Lindy giggled. I kept my grin down to respectable proportions.
"You're in good form," I said. "So what's bugging you?"
Pegleg shrugged and hunched down in the chair. After a moment he waved a hand at the screen.
"Ennui!" he said. "Boredom! We've been lying doggo out here in the moon shadow for a month. We've listened and we've listened—and if anybody has learned anything, they've carefully kept it from me!"
We're used to Pegleg. We wouldn't even like him any way but the way he is. Occasionally he'll put your teeth on edge, but whenever I undertake a field mission where the chips are really down, Pegleg's the other man. We complement each other like salt and vinegar. Pegleg's one of the great geologists—and as an ecologist, I'm not so bad. So I knew what he meant.
"Don't blame it on Mother Earth," I said. "Blame Johnny Rasmussen. He has an itch. You know that. And he's never had one yet where the scratching didn't turn out to be fun."
Pegleg sprawled deeper in the chair. Reflectively he stared at the screen and automatically flexed his plastic knee joint. He does this when he's thinking. It was while we were scratching one of Rasmussen's itches that he lost that leg, bitten off smooth by a plesiosaur-like critter in a little lagoon on a planet I'd just as soon forget. That one had been only partly fun.
But as I said, I knew what he meant. A geologist hasn't got much going for him in space. He's got to have something to set his feet on, rocks to swing his hammer against. And the ecologist is no better off. Oh, I suppose I could get concerned about the space biome. But it's not me. I need my habitats tangible, my biota solid enough to feel and see.
Lindy rolled out of my lap and stood looking down on us both.
"I think," she said casually, "that I've become supernumerary. I recognize the symptoms. You two want to sit and deplore your respective futile situations. You may forget that I, too, am temporarily unemployed."
Lindy's genius with extraterrestrial microforms is such that we wouldn't dare a landing without her. She was Dr. Linda Peterson, microbiologist extraordinary, long before she was Mrs. Roscoe Kissinger. In fact, Johnny Rasmussen has never recognized the marriage, even though he performed the ceremony. He still carries her on the roster as Dr. Peterson.
"Sit down, Lindy," Pegleg said. "We couldn't gripe with effect without you."
"No," said my gorgeous wife. "When discontent's the topic, it's still a man's world. Or should I say universe? I think I'll go run a diabetes test on myself."
Even Pegleg grinned.
But it started then, and almost unwillingly we listened. Not that it was unpleasant. It wasn't at all. It was strange, weird, haunting. The sounds came rolling out of the speakers with a curious lack of rhythm, with no pattern that could be pinned down. In fact, that was what was driving the sound boys out of their skulls.
Here were no pulsars, no monotonously repeated patterns of any of the several types of sound we're getting now from space. Here was infinite sound variety, constantly changing tone and pitch, sometimes like soft music, sometimes raucous, but with a compelling completeness, point and counterpoint. It went from laughter to pleading, from murmur to roar. And yet the overall feel of it was alien. As sophisticated and endlessly changing as it was, no one even considered that it might have human origin. It was from space, from deep space, and no tests that we had yet made could tell us even the direction from whence it came.
I say "we" because that was the way Dr. Johannes Rasmussen regarded every mission the Stardust undertook. Each job was a team job. Sitting out here in the moon shadow, swinging with the moon in its orbit around Earth, an elaborate organization of explorer specialists, Earth's finest space teams, had only one mandate, one directive. Everyone, regardless of concern or training, was asked to listen to the sounds, to the always different medley our energy dish was picking up from the great disk on the moon.
At intervals that never varied, nineteen hours and thirteen minutes thirty-seven seconds, the cosmic broadcasts poured from the speakers. They lasted exactly fourteen minutes seven seconds. From the first decibel they had been carefully and completely recorded, and each staff member was urged, in addition to his other duties, to listen to the tapes whenever he had the chance. Since our duties were minimal, to be charitable, we had heard a lot of replays. They hadn't helped a bit.
So we listened now. Lindy dropped back into my lap, and we held hands and sat quietly while the speakers gurgled and cried and moaned.
"They're unhappy," Lindy murmured. "They're in danger and frightened and alone. They're begging for help. They're not frantic yet, but they hope we'll hear them. They know they can't help themselves."
"They?" Pegleg and I said it together.
"They!" Lindy said firmly.
" 'One giant step,'" Pegleg quoted. "Have you told Johnny Rasmussen? He'll be delighted. He'll be especially interested in how you know."
Lindy gestured helplessly and squirmed on my lap.
"He'll be like you," she said in disgust. "Literal. Obtuse. But I feel it! That's not just contact. That's urgent contact. They need us!"
Pegleg shifted his gaze to me.
"Your wife makes a nice appearance in public, but she's subject to hallucinations. I hope it doesn't interfere with your home life."
"Helps, really," I deadpanned. "She thinks I'm handsome."
"That proves my point," Pegleg said.
If this dialogue seems out of character to you, just know that it's the way we are. It's the smoke screen behind which we think. We've been doing it our way for years, and in general things have come out all right. See the thick sheaf of research papers under each of our names in any library worthy to be called a library. We've all got oak-leaf clusters on our Ph.Ds.
But we weren't trained for this. And the sound boys and the cryptographers and the language experts were beginning to suspect that they weren't either. Especially befuddled were the communications specialists. For the medley of sounds, picked up by the fifty-acre reception disk on the moon as though it were originating just beyond the next hill, was directionless. After a full month of trying, they still had no clue. The great disk received the sounds equally well whether phased for north or south, east or west; whether focused critically on Polaris, Deneb, or Arcturus. And we, hanging in space thirty thousand miles away, found that even their relay was hard to orient.
We listened until the end. As always, there were familiar elements in the broadcast that I felt the cryptographers should have been able to use. But each transmission was different, and since Lindy had suggested it, I fancied that the tone of each was special. Somewhere, beings with an advanced technology were telling a story to the galaxy. Hoping, hoping, that somewhere there were beings who could hear. These were feelings, too. My feelings. Only the variety, complexity, and timing of the broadcasts could be used for support for them. So I kept them to myself.
The last notes of the transmission, a plaintive, appealing series of wails, died away.
Lindy shifted in my arms. She sighed gently.
"The Music of the Spheres," she said.
Pegleg and I were silent. There was nothing to say.
Of the personnel of the Stardust, of all the assorted specialists that made up the Earth's most elaborate space organization, one person was never out of a job. Pegleg and I could gripe; Lindy could sigh for new space bugs; Bud Merani could fidget because there was nothing for an archaeologist to explore out there in the moon shadow. But Ursula Potts was busy.
Ursula was nothing you'd expect to find in a starship. Little, skinny, old, with weasel features and a great bun of gray hair, she looked like her usual mode of transportation ought to be a broom. To see her strolling the corridors in sneakers, knee-length shorts of red or yellow or green, and an old gray sweater that she wore inside or out, hot planet or cold, was enough to make you wonder if it wasn't time for your annual checkup. I mean you, of course. Not us. We knew her well; knew her and respected her, and sometimes were even a little afraid of her.
Ursula painted. Painters are traditionally kooks, and Ursula abused even that privilege, but she also was a mystic—and a genius. Johnny Rasmussen spent more time looking at Ursula's paintings than he did reading my reports. And I didn't resent it. Somehow, Ursula saw things nobody else saw. She pulled together the results of a look-see.
She beckoned to me as I passed her studio door. She didn't do that to everybody. But we'd seen some strange things together, she and Lindy and Pegleg and I. She was with us at Armageddon on Cyrene Four. So I slid back the door and stepped out into the studio; out into the raw depths of space. Or so it seemed.
"What do you see, Roscoe?"
No greeting. No nothing. She didn't even wave at the big painting on her easel. But that's what she wanted me to look at. Her strange eyes were glinting in a way I recognized. Ursula was excited about something.
A big, decorated star map. That was my first impression of Ursula's painting. Not her usual thing at all. But when I looked closer, I could see what she'd done. It wasn't a star map. Actually, it was a series of isolated sketches on one canvas. They would have been familiar to any schoolchild.
