The Best of Connie Willis (51 page)

“Oh,” he said and turned to the Altairi. “The answer to your question is yes.”

“These are tidings of great joy,” the one in the center said.

“There shall be many mistletoeings,” the one on the end added.

The second Altairus on the left glared at them. “I think we’d better sing,” I said, and squeezed into the first row, between Reverend McIntyre and an African American woman in a turban and dashiki.

Calvin stepped onto the podium. “The Hallelujah Chorus,” Calvin said, and there was a shuffling of pages as people found their music. The woman next to me held out her music to me so we could share and whispered, “It’s considered proper etiquette to stand for this. In honor of King George the Third. He’s supposed to have stood up the first time he heard it.”

“Actually,” Reverend McIntyre whispered to me, “he may merely have been startled out of a sound sleep, but rising out of respect and admiration is still an appropriate response.”

I nodded. Calvin raised his baton, and the entire auditorium, except for the Altairi, rose as one and began to sing. And if I’d thought
“Adeste Fideles”
sounded wonderful, “The Hallelujah Chorus” was absolutely breathtaking, and suddenly all those lyrics about glorious songs of old and anthems sweet and repeating the sounding joy made sense. “And the whole world give back the song,” I thought, “which now the angels sing.”

And apparently the Altairi were as overwhelmed by the music as I was. After the fifth “Hal-leh-eh-lu-jah!” they rose into the air like they’d
done before. And rose. And rose, till they floated giddily just below the high domed ceiling.

I knew just how they felt.

It was definitely a communications breakthrough. The Altairi haven’t stopped talking since the All-City Sing, though we’re not actually much farther along than we were before. They’re much better at asking questions than answering them. They did finally tell us where they came from—the star Alsafi in the constellation Draco. But since the meaning of Altair is “the flying one” (and Alsafi means “cooking tripod”), everyone still calls them the Altairi.

They also told us why they’d turned up at Calvin’s apartment and kept following me (“We glimpsed interesting possibilities of accord between you and Mr. Ledbetter”) and explained, more or less, how their spaceship works, which the Air Force has found extremely interesting. But we still don’t know why they came here. Or what they want. The only thing they’ve told us specifically was that they wanted to have Dr. Morthman and Reverend Thresher removed from the commission and to have Dr. Wakamura put in charge. It turns out they like being squirted, at least as much as they like anything we do. They still glare.

So does Aunt Judith. She called me the day after the All-City Sing to tell me she’d seen me on CNN and thought I’d done a nice job saving the planet, but what on earth was I wearing? Didn’t I know one was supposed to dress up for a concert? I told her everything that had happened was all thanks to her, and she glared at me (I could feel it, even over the phone) and hung up.

But she must not be too mad. When she heard I was engaged, she called my sister Tracy and told her she expected to be invited to the wedding shower. My mother is cleaning like mad.

I wonder if the Altairi will give us a fish slice. Or a birthday card with a dollar in it. Or faster-than-light travel.

When I wrote this story, I relied heavily on my thirty-odd years of experience singing in church choirs, during which I sang every Christmas carol ever written and learned way more than I ever wanted to know about them. And about everything else.

As I have often said, everything you need to know about the world can be learned by singing in a church choir. Comedy, drama, intrigue, romance, revenge, pride, lust, envy, greed, vainglory … You name it, church choirs have it all. Plus, you find out a bunch of other useful stuff to get you through life. Like:

1. If the person singing next to you is flat, it’s fairly easy to stay on pitch. If they’re sharp, you’re doomed.

2. The third verse of any hymn (or the fifth if it has six verses) is where they stick the really terrible lyrics, which is why so many ministers opt for “verses 1, 2, and 4.” Verse 3 is where you’ll find gems like “sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying” and “O mysterious condescending! O abandonment sublime!”

3. On the other hand, at least hymns with bad lyrics are
interesting
, unlike most of modern praise music, which is boring beyond belief. I’ll take “Nor thorns infest the ground” over “Oh, God, you’re so awesome” any day.

4. Divinely inspired is not the same as good. Many beloved hymns and Christmas carols are actually hideous, which you would know if you had to sing them every year.

I particularly loathe “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” During one of those Christmas Eve services where they tell the carol’s history and then the choir sings it (the carol, not the history), the minister described in detail the circumstances under which “O Little Town” had been written.

The author, the minister said, an Episcopal priest named Phillips Brooks, had visited the Holy Land, ridden to Bethlehem on horseback, and, once there, sat through a five-hour church service, and had been so inspired by the whole experience that he’d immediately sat down (really? I find the entire story somewhat questionable) and written the carol.

After which account, my daughter (also in the choir and sitting next to me) leaned over and whispered to me, “Oh, well, I guess it’s the thought that counts, Mom,” followed by sputters of suppressed laughter and our not being allowed to sit together anymore.

On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road. I was in the far left lane of Van Buren, ten lanes away from it, and its long legs were facing away from me, the squarish muzzle flat against the pavement so it looked narrower than it really was, and for a minute I thought it was a dog.

I had not seen an animal in the road like that for fifteen years. They can’t get onto the divideds, of course, and most of the multiways are fenced. And people are more careful of their animals.

The jackal was probably somebody’s pet. This part of Phoenix was mostly residential, and after all this time people still think they can turn the nasty, carrion-loving creatures into pets. Which was no reason to have hit it and, worse, left it there. It’s a felony to strike an animal and another one to not report it, but whoever had hit it was long gone.

I pulled the Hitori over onto the center shoulder and sat there awhile, staring at the empty multiway. I wondered who had hit it and whether they had stopped to see if it was dead.

Katie had stopped. She had hit the brakes so hard she sent her car
into a skid that brought it up against the ditch, and jumped out of the jeep. I was still running toward him, floundering in the snow. We made it to him almost at the same time. I knelt beside him, the camera dangling from my neck, its broken case hanging half-open.

“I hit him,” Katie had said. “I hit him with the jeep.”

I looked in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t even see over the pile of camera equipment in the backseat with the eisenstadt balanced on top. I got out. I had come nearly a mile, and looking back, I couldn’t see the jackal, though I knew now that that was what it was.

“McCombe! David! Are you there yet?” Ramirez’s voice said from inside the car.

I leaned in. “No,” I shouted in the general direction of the phone’s receiver. “I’m still on the multiway.”

“Mother of God, what’s taking you so long? The governor’s conference is at twelve, and I want you to go out to Scottsdale and do a layout on the closing of Taliesin West. The appointment’s for ten. Listen, McCombe, I got the poop on the Amblers for you. They bill themselves as ‘One-Hundred Percent Authentic,’ but they’re not. Their RV isn’t really a Winnebago, it’s an Open Road.

“It
is
the last RV on the road, though, according to Highway Patrol. A man named Eldridge was touring with one, also
not
a Winnebago, a Shasta, until March, but he lost his license in Oklahoma for using a tanker lane, so this is it. Recreation vehicles are banned in all but four states. Texas has legislation in committee, and Utah has a full-divided bill coming up next month. Arizona will be next, so take lots of pictures, Danny Boy. This may be your last chance. And get some of the zoo.”

“What about the Amblers?” I said.

“Their name
is
Ambler, believe it or not. I ran a lifeline on them. He was a welder. She was a bank teller. No kids. They’ve been doing this since eighty-nine when he retired. Nineteen years. David, are you using the eisenstadt?”

We had been through this the last three times I’d been on a shoot. “I’m not
there
yet,” I said.

“Well, I want you to use it at the governor’s conference. Set it on his desk if you can.”

I intended to set it on a desk, all right. One of the desks at the back, and let it get some nice shots of the rear ends of reporters as they reached wildly for a little clear airspace to shoot their pictures in, some of them holding their vidcams in their upstretched arms and aiming them in what they hope is the right direction because they can’t see the governor at all, or let it get a nice shot of one of the reporter’s arms as he knocked it facedown on the desk.

“This one’s a new model. It’s got a trigger. It’s set for faces, full-lengths, and vehicles.”

So great. I come home with a hundred-frame cartridge full of passersby and tricycles. How the hell did it know when to click the shutter or which one was the governor in a press conference of eight hundred people, full-length
or
face? It was supposed to have all kinds of fancy light-metrics and computer-composition features, but all it could really do was mindlessly snap whatever passed in front of its idiot lens, just like the highway speed cameras.

It had probably been designed by the same government types who’d put the highway cameras along the road instead of overhead so that all it takes is a little speed to reduce the new side license plates to a blur, and people go faster than ever. A great camera, the eisenstadt. I could hardly wait to use it.

“Sun-co’s very interested in the eisenstadt,” Ramirez said. She didn’t say good-bye. She never does. She just stops talking and then starts up again later. I looked back in the direction of the jackal.

The multiway was completely deserted. New cars and singles don’t use the undivided multiways much, even during rush hours. Too many of the little cars have been squashed by tankers. Usually there are at least a few obsoletes and renegade semis taking advantage of the Patrol’s being on the divideds, but there wasn’t anybody at all.

I got back in the car and backed up even with the jackal. I turned off the ignition but didn’t get out. I could see the trickle of blood from
its mouth from here. A tanker went roaring past out of nowhere, trying to beat the cameras, straddling the three middle lanes and crushing the jackal’s rear half to a bloody mush. It was a good thing I hadn’t been trying to cross the road. He never would have even seen me.

I started the car and drove to the nearest off-ramp to find a phone. There was one at an old 7-Eleven on McDowell.

“I’m calling to report a dead animal on the road,” I told the woman who answered the Society’s phone.

“Name and number?”

“It’s a jackal,” I said. “It’s between Thirtieth and Thirty-second on Van Buren. It’s in the far right lane.”

“Did you render emergency assistance?”

“There was no assistance to be rendered. It was dead.”

“Did you move the animal to the side of the road?”

“No.”

“Why not?” she said, her tone suddenly sharper, more alert.

Because I thought it was a dog. “I didn’t have a shovel,” I said, and hung up.

I got out to Tempe by eight-thirty, in spite of the fact that every tanker in the state suddenly decided to take Van Buren. I got pushed out onto the shoulder and drove on that most of the way.

The Winnebago was set up in the fairgrounds between Phoenix and Tempe, next to the old zoo. The flyer had said they would be open from nine to nine, and I had wanted to get most of my pictures before they opened, but it was already a quarter to nine, and even if there were no cars in the dusty parking lot, I was probably too late.