Asimov's SF, July 2008 Read online

  I was one of those seventy-five million. It was a hot summer afternoon—a rarity in Superior, Wisconsin—and I was a little nut-brown tomboy, playing tag with my friends. My mother called me inside to see the landing, something I'd said I wanted to see, and I remember complaining about it. The game seemed so much more important.

  But in the unairconditioned house, the curtains drawn to keep the day's heat at bay, the television showed something magical. I can still recall the scratch of the couch beneath my bare legs; my father leaning forward in his easy chair, his elbow on his knee and his hand tucked under his chin as he stared; my mother sitting beside me in her bright yellow sundress, her arms crossed as she worried that the landing would fail.

  A lot of the images I saw in my review of that day so long ago were familiar to me. Some I hadn't seen in more than thirty years, and others had been shown over and over again until they had become meaningless.

  But watching the old tapes and reading the old articles, I remembered something—something important.

  I remembered the hope.

  * * * *

  To those of us who were young in 1969, the moon landing was a formative experience. All of my little friends and I wanted to be astronauts. It didn't matter to me that “girls can't,” as a boy in my neighborhood so rudely told me. We wanted to take part in the glory, to be explorers, to have the chance to look at the Earth from outer space and to say to someone else, “Look! I was born on that blue and white ball down there.”

  It's no accident that director Ron Howard (born 1954) has made a film about the Apollo program and has sponsored several others. No accident that Tom Hanks (born 1956) was in that film and narrated From The Earth to the Moon, a history of the space program, for HBO.

  In 2007, late night talk show host Craig Ferguson (born 1962) interviewed Alan Bean, one of the twelve men who walked on the moon, and acted as if he were interviewing a god.

  To someone in the baby boom generation, the astronauts were gods. And even now, for those of us of a certain age, those Apollo astronauts represent our best hopes and our dreams.

  A few nights ago, I heard a commercial on a local radio station. The sounds of the moon landing played as if they were happening now. Then a news announcer cut in, “We interrupt this broadcast for an important news bulletin” as if what they were already playing wasn't important at all. The breaking news was about cheap toner at Staples.

  By the time the commercial ended, I was furious.

  As a former broadcaster and a woman who once wrote commercials, I know what happened. The advertiser wanted to juxtapose a real-life news event with something silly, to show how our sense of the important had skewed.

  And I have a hunch the lawyers got involved—or maybe the politically correct police: You can't use something like the fires in Southern California or the Iraq war as your back-ground news story. People got hurt in that and no one would see the humor in the commercial. Let's use something no longer important. Let's use the moon landing.

  To entire generations, the moon landing is as distant as World War I. To some Americans, the moon landing isn't as important as the American Civil War.

  But to some of us, the moon landing was the one of the central events of our young lives.

  It inspired me to become a science fiction writer because it taught me several important things: It taught me that human beings can do anything if we but try; it taught me that hope can interrupt the world's mayhem if only for a few hours; and it taught me to look up.

  Whoever designed the catchphrase for the current documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, defined this feeling best for me:

  Remember when the whole world looked up?

  I do.

  Quite vividly.

  And I want us to look up again.

  * * * *

  The world is very different now and yet startlingly the same. It is still full of mayhem. People die in senseless wars and children are starving. Poverty hasn't been eradicated, and we're still earthbound.

  Science fiction is different, too. It's no longer the genre of miracles. Science fiction writers don't get interviewed when some grand scientific event happens, mostly because grand scientific events happen all the time.

  For example, here are the stories from the science section in the Oregonian newspaper the day that I started this article:

  +An astronaut from Eugene, Oregon, will go up on the next shuttle.

  +Scientists are working on a gravitational “tractor” to deflect asteroids

  +Biologists are altering the composition of trees to create biofuel

  +Geneticists have started cloning redwood trees to recreate ancient forests

  +Within the year, huts built for survival on the moon will be tested in Antarctica.

  That's the science section. The business section has articles on Verizon's decision to open its “walled” coverage to other media—which reminded me that my Verizon phone has more memory than the computers that handled all of the Apollo missions combined. And, to top it off, my phone looks like—and has more features than—the communicators used by Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in the original Star Trek.

  This morning, I listened to a podcast of “Nightfall,” on my iPod.[5] This afternoon, an e-mail group I'm on spent the entire day discussing whether or not authors should blog. Striking writers in Hollywood are asking for a piece of the internet downloads of television shows.

  An international space station orbits the Earth. The Chinese and Japanese have developed their own space programs. Russia is reviving its program. People in the private sector (most of them in their forties and fifties—no surprise there) are experimenting with new vehicles to get humans into space.

  We live in a science fiction world. Not the world we imagined in 1969, but one in which I—a huge fan of the space program once upon a time—can't tell you the name of a single modern astronaut. When the news announces that the upcoming night will be so clear that we'll be able to see the shuttle, I sometimes forget to look.

  I'm used to shuttle launches and expanding computer power. I use satellites all the time. My favorite television programs reach me via satellite. The GPS in my phone tracks me from moment to moment—using a satellite. When I'm researching areas I haven't been to for a while, I go to websites that feature real-time satellite photos of the area and zoom in, until I can see the license plates on the cars parked in the street.

  I have gotten used to the changes. I no longer marvel at things that would have caused my jaw to drop fifteen years ago. Until I went to New Haven and saw that article on the great imaginers—the people who envisioned what this world would become, the SF writers whose bold vision had eventually made the moon landing possible—I had forgotten one of the grandest and most glorious aspects of science fiction.

  In one of the darkest times this country has ever known, science—and science fiction—gave us hope. It distracted us from the ugly events on the ground, and made us look up.

  For a brief shining moment, it made us forget the gutter—and dream of the stars.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  * * * *

  [1 New Haven Register, July 12, 1969.]

  [2 Kuralt, Charles, “The Day They Landed,” television program archived in the Paley Center for Media.]

  [3 Chicago Daily Defender, April 10, 1969, p. 8.]

  [4 Kuralt, Charles, “The Day They Landed,” television program archived in the Paley Center for Media.]

  [5 Download your own copy at www.escapepod.org.]

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: LESTER YOUNG AND THE JUPITER'S MOONS’ BLUES

  by Gord Sellar

  Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, grew up in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, and has been living in South Korea since 2002. He has sold work to Nature, Flurb, Postcards from Hell, Fantasy, and Interzone. The author is also a jazz saxophonist, and, although he hasn't played in a jazz group since 2002, he did play with a moderately succe
ssful Korean indie-rock band from 2002-2004. The inspiration for his narrator Robbie's voice owes much to Miles Davis. He tells us, “When I decided to write something about jazz, the voice and many distinctive expressions used by Davis in his autobiography and in interviews I'd seen just bubbled up from high-school memories. In jazz, we often steal one another's riffs and rearrange them—that's old-school remixing, really—and in a sense, this is a fond and respectful tribute-via-remix of Miles Davis himself.” Readers can learn more about the author at his website gordsellar.com.

  His first night back on Earth after his gig on the Frogships, Bird showed up at Minton's cleaner than a broke-dick dog, with a brand new horn and a head full of crazy-people music. He'd got himself a nice suit somewhere, and a fine new Conn alto. Now, this was back in ‘48, when everyone—me included—was crazy about Conn and King and only a few younger cats were playing on Selmer horns.

  But it wasn't just that big-shouldered suit and the horn; the cat was clean. I mean clean, no more dope, no more liquor, no more fried chicken. Hell, he was always called Bird—short for Yardbird—on account of how much fried chicken he liked to eat. This was like a whole different Charlie Parker. He was living clean as a monk. He was walking straight and talking clear. His eyes weren't all fucked-up and scary anymore, either.

  To be honest, I didn't recognize him when he walked into Minton's. It was about three am, and the regular jam session had been going for a long time, and all these cats from Philly had shown up, you know, dressed up like country negroes on Sunday morning and playing all that Philadelphia grandpa-swing they used to like to play. Smooth and all, but old-fashioned, especially for 1948. Even in New York City, the hotbed of bebop and the only place where the Frogs were taking jazz musicians on tour, there was still a lotta old guys dressed up in Zoot suits cut for them five years before, trying to play like Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges and Lester Young used to in the old days, before they all disappeared. Bebop was huge, but a lot of ignorant cats, they were trying to resist it, still disrespecting us, calling what we played “Chinese music” and shit.

  But Bird, he was clean like I said, but he played some shit like I never heard before, like nobody never heard before. I'm telling you, when he went up on the bandstand and brought that horn up to his mouth, the music that came out of it was ... well, it made us crazy. Back in those days, we were like mad scientists when it came to sounds. We'd be taking a leak at the same time and one of us would break wind and we all knew what note it was. We'd call it together, turn to one another laughing and shit, and say, “E-flat, Jack, you just farted an E-flat.” And that night we'd play every third tune in E-flat.

  But them tunes Bird was playing, man, I ain't never heard nobody put notes together like that. The rhythms were so tangled up that even I had to listen close to catch them all. He was playing thirty-seven notes evenly spaced across a four-beat bar in fast swing, crazy licks like that, and he was playing all these halfway tunings, quarter tones and multiphonics and all kinds of craziness. And even so, he was swinging.

  Everyone went crazy, it was just too much. And Bird just grinned like a goddamn king and said, in that snooty British gentleman accent he used to like to put on sometimes, “Ladies and gents, this music is the wave of the future. It received its de-but off the rings of Saturn, and if you don't like it, you can come right on up here and kiss my royal black ass.”

  Them old guys, the Zoot suit cats, they didn't like that, but they didn't say nothing. Everyone remembered how Bird never took no shit off nobody back before he went off touring the solar system.

  Man, all that scared me a little, but I still wanted to get onto one of them Frogships and hear what kind of music everyone was playing up there. They were hiring cats, everyone knew that, but that was all I knew about it. Now, I hadn't never met Bird before, and I knew he wasn't going to talk to me, but Max Roach, Max was drumming there that night, and I'd met Max one time before there at Minton's, so I figured I could talk to him.

  Max, he'd gone up onto the Frogships a year or two back. Well, he looked at me like he knew what I wanted, what I was gonna ask about, but he sat down to talk to me anyway. I told him I wanted onto the ships, wanted to know how to get in.

  “You audition, same as for anything else,” he said, shrugging. “Who knows what they like? Don't ask me.”

  “But you been on the ships...”

  “Uh-huh,” Max said, nodded, but didn't say no more.

  “What kind of music they hire you to play?”

  “Oh, man, you just need to play whatever,” he said in that quiet, calm voice of his. He was a really cool, soulful cat most of the time. “Some of the time, they take cats who swing the old way, real old-fashioned; like what Duke's band used to play in the old days, or Billy Eckstine's. Hell, sometimes they want New Orleans funeral songs, or some cat who plays like Jelly Roll Morton. Other times they only take cats who play real hard bebop, man. You can't never know what they want. But anyway, you don't need to go on up to the ships. It messes a cat up, man.” He tapped the tablecloth with his drumsticks, hit my glass of bourbon with one of them. Ting.

  I know better now, but then I just thought he was stonewalling me. Figured maybe there were only limited spaces, and he was bullshitting me, trying to keep gigs open for cats he knew better.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Look at Bird! Remember when he left? Cat went up there looking like death on a soda cracker, and look at him now!” I glanced over and saw him sitting at a table with Diz and Miles and Monk and Art Blakey and Fat Girl Navarro and a couple of them white women who used to hang around at Minton's. They were laughing like a bunch of old women, like someone had just told a joke a second before. Bird, he wasn't fat no more, he was lean, and real clear-headed and healthy-looking, nothing like when let his ass out of Camarillo. He looked like a cat with a long life ahead of him.

  “Bird's been different, always, man,” Max said. “He's just that kind of cat. Plus, they fixed him up. They wanted him bad, so they took him apart and then put him back together out there. A lot of cats, they just...” Then he stopped, like he didn't know what to say, and his eyes went a little scary, the way Bird's used to be, and he looked at me like he could see through my skin or something, and said, “Look, cats almost never come back like he did. The things that go on ... you can't even imagine,” he said.

  The room went quiet sometime while we were talking, and I could tell Max was relieved. He didn't like talking about the Frogships, didn't want to recommend them to nobody. We both looked around and saw other people were all staring at the back of the club, at the entrance, and what do you know but this big tall-assed Frog had come on in the back and was standing there watching us all.

  These days there ain't a lot of cats who remember what the Frogs looked like, really. It's been so long since they moved on, and let me tell you, the pictures don't show not even the half of it. They were like these big frogs who stretched their skin over a real tall man, but they had more eyes and weird-assed hands. No fingers, just some tentacles on the ends of their goddamned arms, man, and they walked on two legs. Now, this Frog, he was fat, and he wore a Zoot suit tailored specially for him, hat and all, which just made him look totally out, man, just crazy. He came in with three or four guys, white hipsters, and they sat themselves down at a table in the front of the club that was set out for them in a hurry.

  That Frog, he was smoking long, black cigarettes, four or five of them at once, on these long jade cigarette holders. He was looking around, too, with all these eyes on his face, as if to say, Where's the goddamn music? I looked at him closely, and noticed that his skin, his face and hands, even his suit, it was all a little blurry, like a badly shot photograph. He puffed on his cigarettes and looked around.

  Nobody said nothing.

  But all these cats, especially them sad Philly boys, they all thought it was their big chance. They hurried on up onto the bandstand, and they started to play their jumped-up jive-ass swing. That old Frog just leaned on ba
ck in its chair and kept on smoking those slow-burning black cigarettes, sticking its long blue tongue up into the smoke as it puffed it out. There were little black eyes all over its tongue, too, and they swiveled toward the bandstand.

  I couldn't tell if it was bored or enjoying the show, but I do know that finally, after they finished a few tunes, Bird had had enough. He tapped Thelonious Monk on the shoulder, and Monk nodded, and stood up, and went up to the bandstand. Everyone had heard about what had happened that night at the Three Deuces back in January in 1946; everyone knew how these Frog cats felt about Monk's music.

  Man, Thelonious, he just went on up to the piano and sat down, and everyone else on the bandstand just watched him, every one of them quiet and thinking, Oh shit. Monk, he lifted up his hands, all dramatic like he was about to play a Beethoven sonata or whatever, like that, you know what I mean, and when everyone shut up he started playing.

  "Straight, No Chaser." That was a fine tune, just a little jagged and twisted up. He played the head real simple, melody with his right hand, old-fashioned blues stride with the left. The alien leaned forward. Everyone knew how much they liked Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, granddaddy music like that.

  But when Monk finished out the head the second time, and started improvising on the changes, man, you could see him sitting with this big-assed grin on his face up there at the piano. He started playing some of his really Monkish shit, all that weird, tangled up melody, banging out tone clusters over and over and plunking out his crooked little comping rhythms.

  The Frog, when it heard Monk start up with all that, it stood itself up, dropped its cigarettes on the ground and slapped one hand over its huge front face-eyes and the other behind the back of its head. It was moaning—with three or four voices at once—and this blue stuff starting leaking out of its nose. Then it decided it was time to get the hell out.

  It wobbled but finally made it out the door, shaky like a junkie dying to shoot himself up. All them hipster cats it came in with, they all followed it out, making out like they were all nervous and worried. Teddy Hill, who was running Minton's Playhouse back then, he followed them all out with a scared face on, too. Bird, he laughed like a fucking maniac when he saw all that.