Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

God, she thought, it’s all just flashes and fits. We’re just out here in this shit.

With sudden horror she realized at once that there had been another part of the dream and that it involved the fact that she and Io were just out there and that this was not a dream from which one awakened. Because one was , after all.

She turned anxiously to look for Io and saw the child several galleries back, standing in front of the tank where the blind fish were.

The dream had been about getting out of it, trying to come in and make it stop. In the end, when it was most terrible, she had been mercifully carried into a presence before which things had been resolved. The memory of that resolution made her want to weep.

Her eye fell on the animal in the tank. She followed its flights and charges with fascination.

There had been some sort of communication, with or without words.

A trained scientist, Alison loved logic above all else; it was her only important pleasure. If the part about one being out there was true — and it was — what then about the resolution? It seemed to her; as she watched the porpoise, that even dreamed things must have their origin in a kind of truth, that no level of the mind was capable of utterly unfounded construction. Even hallucinations — phenomena with which Alison had become drearily familiar — needed their origins in the empirically verifiable — a cast of light, a sound on the wind. Somehow, she thought, somewhere in the universe, the resolving presence must exist.

Her thoughts raced, and she licked her lips to cool the sere dryness cracking them. Her heart gave a desperate leap.

“Was it you?” she asked the porpoise.

“Yes,” she heard him say. “Yes, it was.”

Alison burst into tears. When she had finished sobbing, she took a Kleenex from her bag, wiped her eyes and leaned against the cool marble beside the tank.

Prepsychosis. Disorders of thought. Failure to abstract.

“This is ridiculous,” she said.

From deep within, from the dreaming place, sounded a voice.

“You’re here,” the porpoise told her. “That’s what matters now.”

Nothing in the creature’s manner suggested communication or even the faintest sentience. But human attitudes of engagement, Alison reminded herself, were not to be expected. To expect them was anthropocentrism — a limiting, reactionary position like ethnocentrism or sexism.

“It’s very hard for me,” she told the porpoise. “I can’t communicate well at the best of times. And an aquarium situation is pretty weird.” At a loss for further words, Alison fell back on indignation. “It must be awful for you.”

“It’s somewhat weird,” she understood the porpoise to say. “I wouldn’t call it awful.”

Alison trembled.

“But … how can it not be awful? A conscious mind shut up in a tank with stupid people staring at you? Not,” she hastened to add, “that I think I’m any better. But the way you’re stuck in here with these slimy, repulsive fish.”

“I don’t find fish slimy and repulsive,” the porpoise told her.

Mortified, Alison began to stammer an apology, but the creature cut her off. “The only fish I see are the ones they feed me. It’s people I see all day. I wonder if you can realize how dry you all are.”

“Good Lord!” She moved closer to the tank. “You must hate us.”

She became aware of laughter.

“I don’t hate.”

Alison’s pleasure at receiving this information was tempered by a political anxiety. The beast’s complacency suggested something objectionable; the suspicion clouded her mind that her interlocutor might be a mere Aquarium Porpoise, a deracinated stooge, an Uncle—

The laughter sounded again.

“I’m sorry,” Alison said. “My head is full of such shit.”

“Our condition is profoundly different from yours. We don’t require the same things. Our souls are as different from yours as our bodies are.”

“I have the feeling,” Alison said, “that yours are better.”

“I think they are. But I’m a porpoise.”

The animal in the tank darted upward, torpedolike, toward the fog-colored surface, then plunged again in a column of spinning, bubbling foam.

“You called me here, didn’t you?” Alison asked. “You wanted me to come.”

“In a way.”

“Only in a way?”

“We communicated our presence here. A number of you might have responded. Personally, I’m satisfied that it was yourself.”

“Are you?” Alison cried joyfully. She was aware that her words echoed through the great room. “You see, I asked because I’ve been having these dreams. Odd things have been happening to me.” She paused thoughtfully. “Like I’ve been listening to the radio sometimes and I’ve heard these wild things — like just for a second. As though there’s been kind of a pattern. Was it you guys?”

“Some of the time. We have our ways.”

“Then,” she asked breathlessly, “why me?”

“Don’t you know why?” the beast asked softly.

“It must have been because you knew I would understand.”

There was no response.

“It must have been because you knew how much I hate the way things are with us. Because you knew I’d listen. Because I need something so much.”

“Yet,” the porpoise said sternly, “you made things this way. You thought you needed them the way they are.”

“It wasn’t me,” Alison said. “Not me. I don’t need this shit.”

Wide-eyed, she watched him shoot for the surface again, then dive and skim over the floor of his tank, rounding smartly at the wall.

“I love you,” she declared suddenly. “I mean, I feel a great love for you and I feel there is a great lovingness in you. I just know that there’s something really super-important that I can learn from you.”

“Are you prepared to know how it is with us?”

“Yes,” Alison said. “Oh, yes. And what I can do.”

“You can be free,” the animal said. “You can learn to perceive in a new way.”

Alison became aware of Io standing beside her frowning up at her tears. She bent down and put her head next to the child’s.

“Io, can you see the dolphin? Do you like him?”

“Yes,” Io said.

Alison stood up.

“My daughter” she told her dolphin.

Io watched the animal contentedly for a while and then went to sit on a bench in the back of the hall.

“She’s only three and a half,” Alison said. She feared that communion might be suspended on the introduction of a third party. “Do you like her?”

“We see a great many of your children,” the beast replied. “I can’t answer you in those terms.”

Alison became anxious.

“Does that mean that you don’t have any emotions? That you can’t love?”

“Were I to answer yes or no I would deceive you either way. Let’s say only that we don’t make the same distinctions.”

“I don’t understand,” Alison said. “I suppose I’m not ready to.”

“As your perception changes,” the porpoise told her; “many things will seem strange and unfamiliar. You must unlearn old structures of thought that have been forced on you. Much faith, much resolution will be required.”

“I’ll resist,” Alison admitted sadly. “I know I will. I’m very skeptical and frivolous by nature. And it’s all so strange and wonderful that I can’t believe it.”

“All doubt is the product of your animal nature. You must rise above your species. You must trust those who instruct you.”

“I’ll try,” Alison said resolutely. “But it’s so incredible! I mean, for all these centuries you guys and us have been the only aware species on the planet, and now we’ve finally come together! It just blows my mind that here — now — for the first time…”