Reaching for Brahms’ tail as he rooted and muttered around her, lifting herself to some less strenuous accommodation, she felt that she in some way was sinking toward some kind of new, ursine splendor, had somehow—by pain, by terror, by the pink pity of her ravaged limbs—dissolved the barrier between herself and the beast atop her. Picking and poking at the secret heart of the great animal she found herself served as well as serving, become more than sheer receptacle: it was a kind of way out, perhaps: it was the method of escape that sinks one more fully into the pit, and as the bear commenced its familiar, groaning adumbration of expenditure she shouted something, hoarse and guttural, caw like the bark of an animal, something before language which was itself language and gripping that fur tried to come up with Brahms even in the bear’s descent: and the long, pivoting drop which in its suspension and calamitous nature seemed in some way to mimic her confused ideas of escape, to be escape: go farther in: become: belong. Sunk into slivers, vaulted into light, she felt herself as one with Brahms even as the seizure squirted to the expected silence and the bear shambled away as if she did not exist at all.
In the rapid metronomic shudderings of Bach, she now found—earlier or later, but now—that some deepened surge of her own entrails, her own wordless wants was smoothed, engaged to rhythmic response by the motions of the bear and so it was no surprise at all when, yielding in sudden spasm, Bach broke from that complex rhythm and, balancing perilously on one paw, began a fragmented, syncopated movement which she first accommodated and then seemed to pass through, as light passes through a window, as semen passes through the tubing flesh and in that passing she ascended, risen as Bach, like Brahms, fell to snuffling and somehow troubled silence beside her, before himself rising to shamble away in unaccustomed ursine muttering.
And now she, beyond language but not gesture, beckoned from the floor to Beethoven, beckoned in the light: Come on, she said to the beast, come on then, you too and again the clasp, the enclosure, the idea bursting in her mind: becoming one with them, grunting and heaving as Beethoven grunted and heaved, her own fur rising in small shreds and hackles as she rotated her knees, her long scarred open legs against the spiteful silence of the bear against her, the gigantic hammer of the bear against her, and this time she took it without a cry, without sound at all until Beethoven’s own grunt of sudden and arrhythmic expenditure from which he fell as the others had fallen, shambled as they had shambled, sat now as they sat: staring at her, clumps of soot and sweat, muzzles uplifted as if to scent on the air the smell of her change and she watched them back, watched those brooding and immobile shapes as if she were in control of this situation, which in no real sense could ever be the case. She had abdicated all control in her greed for the feast: very well. Let greed be her master, then; let escape be entrance; let in be furthest in of all.
She had entered in curiosity and hunger, bedazzled by that unexpected house in the shattered woods, untroubled by the warnings of those with whom she had traveled before she had embarked, alone, on this more rigorous journey; and in what measure had they cared, to allow her the journey at all? And so the door, the house, the feast on the table one soaring poem of satiation: this: here: take: eat: and reaching beyond the sweetmeats, reaching toward some gorging fulmination which would have been, she knew, as close to ecstasy as she would ever come in the lonely and desperate life which was all that had been granted her, in that reach and grasp she had heard only the marveling thunder of her heart, that aching engine of greed in the presence of fulfillment: but she had not gone far enough, it seemed, had wanted but not fully, had reached but not taken, grasped, eaten, become: had only raised her eyes to see their eyes, little and bright, empty and full, to hear above the bewildered crooning of her own empty breath their breath murmurous, the sour and tangible entry into the world of the door, the floor, the light, the slivers, the odd varying rhythms of the beasts. You wanted to be filled? their postures asked her as they came upon her. Then be filled. To bursting.
But that was the secret, was it not? after all? The floor, yes, the slivers and the pains, yes, but yes, too, her own new knowledge, sieved from degradation, obtained from going all the way in: take the bears, receive them, be a bear, the Queen of the Bears, the queen of the magic forest and the empty house, daughter of the night born to gambol in stricken and ecstatic pleasure with those three refracted selves restored to her through pain: the autumn, the pedant, and the hammer, all three dense with need, her own need, her own greed as she raised herself on her elbows, there on the floor, there at the feast, and she bared her stained and filthy teeth to say Come: come to me now, and as if in their first true moment of attention came the hawking groans, the motions of the bears: turning, first toward one another, then to form a circle, a unit, one lumbering and dreadful mass as all three, as one, advanced upon her: to receive her benediction: to pour and fill and to become.
Fiction grants us monsters, constructs, masks—to explain, to deflect, to deny those actions, those thoughts and longings we feel but feel to be intolerable—as sex grants us roles to play, positions to assume: but in both arenas need is the only gospeclass="underline" feed me, says the beast, and so we do.
We are Pound’s pallid leash-men, and all the beasts are one.
Sextraterrestrials
JOE HALDEMAN AND JANE YOLEN
The youngest writer to be named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, author Joe Haldeman has regularly earned awards over his forty-three-year career. His novels The Forever War and Forever Peace both made clean sweeps of the Hugo and Nebula awards, and he has won three more Hugos and Nebulas for other novels and shorter works. Haldeman also won the Rhysling Award three times for best science fiction poem of the year. In 2012, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. The final novel in a trilogy, Earthbound, was published in 2011 (after Marsbound and Starbound). Director-producer Ridley Scott bought the movie rights to The Forever War.
Haldeman’s next novel will be Work Done for Hire. When he’s not writing or teaching—a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has taught every fall semester since 1983—he paints, bicycles, and spends as much time as he can out under the stars as an amateur astronomer. He’s been married for forty-seven years to Mary Gay Potter Haldeman.
Jane Yolen, often called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America,” is the author of more than three hundred books, most (but not all) for children. Her books and stories have won two Nebula awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, three Golden Kite awards, three Mythopoeic awards, two Christopher Medals, a Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among others. She is also the winner (for body of work) of the Kerlan Award, the World Fantasy Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master award, the Skylark Award from the New England Science Fiction Association, the Catholic Library’s Regina Medal, and the 2012 de Grummond Medal. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates. For more information, visit her website at: www.janeyolen.com.