Tales of Time and Space Read online

  Other Books by Allen Steele

  NOVELS

  Near-Space Series

  Orbital Decay

  Clarke County, Space

  Lunar Descent

  Labyrinth of Night

  A King of Infinite Space

  The Jericho Iteration

  The Tranquillity Alternative

  Oceanspace

  Time Loves a Hero

  (aka Chronospace)

  Apollo’s Outcasts

  V-S Day

  Arkwright

  Coyote Trilogy

  Coyote

  Coyote Rising

  Coyote Frontier

  Coyote Chronicles

  Coyote Horizon

  Coyote Destiny

  Coyote Universe

  Spindrift

  Galaxy Blues

  Hex

  NOVELLAS

  The Weight

  The River Horses

  Angel of Europa

  COLLECTIONS

  Rude Astronauts

  All-American Alien Boy

  Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories

  American Beauty

  The Last Science Fiction Writer

  NON-FICTION

  Primary Ignition

  “Martian Blood” originally appeared in Old Mars, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois; Bantam, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Allen M. Steele.

  “Ticking” originally appeared in Solaris Rising 2, edited by Ian Whates; Solaris, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Allen M. Steele.

  “The Other Side of Jordan” originally appeared in Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams; Prime, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Allen M. Steele.

  “Cathedrals” originally appeared in Starship Century, edited by James Benford and Gregory Benford; Lucky Bat, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Allen M. Steele.

  “The Jekyll Island Horror” originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, edited by Sheila Williams; January 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Allen M. Steele.

  “Locomotive Joe and the Wreck of Space Train No. 4” originally appeared in Impossible Futures, edited by Judith K. Dial and Thomas Easton; Pink Narcissus, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Allen M. Steele.

  “Alive and Well, A Long Way From Anywhere” originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, edited by Sheila Williams; July 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Allen M. Steele.

  “Sixteen Million Leagues from Versailles” originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, edited by Trevor Quachri; October 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Allen M. Steele.

  “The Heiress of Air” originally appeared in Raygun Chronicles: Space Opera for a New Age, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt; Every Day, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Allen M. Steele.

  “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” originally appeared (in a slightly abridged form) in Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Technology Review limited edition), edited by Stephen Cass; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Allen M. Steele.

  “The Big Whale” originally appeared, in audio version only, in Rip-Off! edited by Gardner Dozois. Audiobook.com, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Allen M. Steele.

  “The Observation Post” originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, edited by Sheila Williams; September 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Allen M. Steele.

  Collection © 2015 by Allen M. Steele

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

  In-house editor: Ian Randal Strock

  Fantastic Books

  1380 East 17 Street, Suite 2233

  Brooklyn, New York 11230

  www.FantasticBooks.biz

  ISBN 10: 1-62755-634-6

  ISBN 13: 978-1-62755-634-7

  First Edition

  In memory of my sister,

  Rachel Steele.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: Pattern Recognition

  Martian Blood

  Ticking

  Two from Coyote:

  The Other Side of Jordan

  Cathedrals

  The Jekyll Island Horror

  Locomotive Joe and the Wreck of Space Train No. 4

  Four from Near Space:

  Sixteen Million Leagues from Versailles

  Alive and Well, A Long Way from Anywhere

  The Heiress of Air

  Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

  The Big Whale

  The Observation Post

  INTRODUCTION:

  PATTERN RECOGNITION

  Someone wiser than me once noted that writing is a bit like competitive running in that, while novels are marathons that test the endurance and stamina of their authors, short fiction is more like fifty-yard dashes in which the writers expend their energy in quick bursts of energy and inspiration that carries them across the finish line.

  That analogy makes a lot of sense to me. I write both novels and short stories, with novellas being the region between (novelettes are little more than a category created for awards purposes; in reality, they’re just long short stories). Whereas a novel typically takes me nine or ten months to write—eighteen months or more with longer works like most of the Coyote novels—I can write a story in two or three weeks. Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to writing short fiction between novels as a way to recharge between the long fall-to-spring stretches in which I go into seclusion to produce another long work.

  And just as a competitive sprinter moves from one track to another, the short stories and novellas I write are usually unrelated to one another (except, of course, when they’re installments of a long-running series like Near Space or part of a mosaic novel like Coyote). In that case, I’m often working from notes I’ve jotted down or fragmentary ideas I’ve been carrying around in my head, waiting for the moment when I figure out what to do with them.

  Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down when I gather the short fiction I’ve published lately to put together another collection. When that happens, I sometimes realize that I’ve been running a marathon of short sprints. That is, while the stories seem to be unrelated to one another, certain patterns begin to emerge once they’re placed side by side.

  Very often, these patterns indicate the sort of mindset I had at the time. For instance, one of my earlier collections, All-American Alien Boy, had an unusually high number of near-future stories set on Earth, specifically in St. Louis. In hindsight, it came clear that the reason for that was I’d become tired of writing about space, at least for a little while, and decided to use the city to which I’d recently moved as a setting.

  This time around, though, I was at loss to explain what some of these patterns meant. For instance, of the twelve stories in this collection, eight are told by first-person narrators, and yet no two of these characters are exactly alike. A writer, a wilderness guide, a train conductor, an itinerant spacer, a former Navy airship crewman, a public relations spokesman, a valet, a harpooner-cum private detective…the identities are different, and even in the case of the stories which take place in my Coyote and Near Space universes, so are the locales. But I couldn’t tell you why I put myself in the heads of those characters, other than the obvious narrative advantage of seeing things through their eyes.

  It also occurred to me that, perhaps more than any other period in my writing career, I’d produced quite a few stories with historical settings. Yet while “Martian Blood” and “Locomotive Joe and the Wreck of Space Train No. 4” are alternate-history interplanetary adventures (with the f
ormer being set in an alternative present) and “The Observation Post” is a time-travel story, it’s more difficult to describe “The Jekyll Island Horror” or “The Big Whale.” They’re hard to categorize, and I’m not sure I’d even call either one of them science fiction. Subconsciously, I think I was rebelling against the supposition that the future is the default setting for a science fiction story, and instead wrote stories that took place in the past. Even “Ticking” is pretty much set in the present day, if you ignore the fact that robots aren’t yet ubiquitous to everyday life.

  But the thing which I found most surprising, when I put together the acknowledgments page, is the fact that nine out of twelve of these stories were published in a two-year period…and indeed, if memory serves correctly, they were written in an eighteen-month stretch between late 2011 and early 2013. I know how I wrote this much short fiction in a relatively brief amount of time—a novel crashed on me, and so I turned to short stories for a while—but what eludes is me is why.

  This was a rather stressful time in my life. I lost family and friends, almost always suddenly and with no warning, and a recurring medical condition put me in the hospital so many times the emergency room red-flagged me as a frequent patient: don’t ask questions, just stick him in a bed and hook up him up to an IV. I won’t go into details, but this put me in a dark and rather morbid frame of mind. I should have had a breakdown, but instead it appears that my response was to write a lot of short fiction…but why stories instead of, say, a 1,000-page novel?

  It now occurs to me that, while this was going on, an anniversary crept up without me really realizing it. 2013 marked my twenty-fifth year as a published science fiction writer; while I wasn’t looking, a quarter-century passed between my first widely published short story, “Live from the Mars Hotel,” appearing in Asimov’s Science Fiction (which has remained my home base ever since—three stories in this collection were first published there) and the appearance of most of the stories here.

  I guess this makes sense. Although I’ve written nineteen novels over the past two and a half decades, the truth of the matter is that short fiction is my first love. When I set out as a teenager to become a science fiction writer when I grew up, my goal was to publish SF stories, not novels…and I guess it tells us something that nearly all of the awards I’ve received during my career have been for my short work, while only my first novel, Orbital Decay, has ever received any formal recognition (the Locus Award for Best First novel of 1989…and the late Charles Brown, the publisher of Locus, was too cheap to give me a plaque!).

  On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I could be reading too much into this. There may not be any meaningful patterns to be divined here, only a set of coincidences. If so, these stories shouldn’t be taken for anything other than what they are: tales of time and space, little excursions to other worlds and years. I’ve written brief introductions for each story in which I’ve talked a bit about their origins, but it’s not necessary to read them, and you’re invited to skip them if you’re annoyed by this sort of thing.

  I doubt I’ll still be writing another twenty-five years from now. If I’m still alive by then, I probably will have long since retired from the keyboard. On the other hand, I’m a bit surprised that my career has lasted as long as it has. Barry Malzberg once wrote that a science fiction author’s career, on average, usually lasts only twenty years. If this is true, then I’ve managed to beat the odds. So while I appreciate the editors who’ve bought and published these stories—their names are on the acknowledgments page, and I’ll add to them Ian Randal Strock, the editor and publisher of Fantastic Books—my most sincere thanks go to my readers, who’ve allowed me to keep writing this stuff for all these years.

  —Whately, Massachusetts

  June, 2014

  Except for Coyote, which I created myself and the Moon, the world I’ve written the most about has been Mars. It was the setting of my first published story, “Live From the Mars Hotel,” which eventually found its way to the actual planet aboard NASA’s Phoenix lander—a long story in itself—and since then I’ve written about a half-dozen stories about the place, along with my novel Labyrinth of Night.

  This one is a bit different from the others. It concerns the kind of Mars that was common in science fiction before the American and Russian probes of the 1960s revealed the world as being much less habitable than SF writers had imagined. I always loved the Mars depicted by Bradbury, Heinlein, Brackett, and Zelazny, so this is my homage to them. In its own way, it’s quite accurate; my principal source was The Exploration of Mars by Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun, published in 1956, with the place-names drawn from Giovanni Schiaparelli’s maps from the late 1800s.

  This looks like alternate history, but that’s not quite accurate. Cell phones, casinos, jeeps…this story is set in contemporary times. But I’m not sure this is a Mars any of us would necessarily want to visit. The natives are restless.

  MARTIAN BLOOD

  The most dangerous man on Mars was Omar al-Baz, and the first time I saw him, he was throwing up at the Rio Zephyria spaceport.

  This happens more frequently than you might think. People coming here for the first time often don’t realize just how thin the air really is. The cold surprises them, too, but I’m told the atmospheric pressure is about same as you’d find in the Himalayas. So they come trooping down the ramp of the shuttle that transported them from Deimos Station, and if the ride down didn’t make them puke, then the shortness of breath, headaches, and nausea that comes with altitude sickness will.

  I didn’t know for sure that the middle-aged gent who’d doubled over and vomited was Dr. al-Baz, but I suspected he was; I hadn’t seen any other Middle Eastern men on his flight. There was nothing I could do for him, though, so I waited patiently on the other side of the chain-link security fence while one of the flight attendants came down the ramp to help him. Dr. al-Baz waved her away; he didn’t need any assistance, thank you. He straightened up, pulled a handkerchief from his overcoat pocket and wiped his mouth, then picked up the handle of the rolling bag he’d dropped when his stomach revolted. Nice to know that he wasn’t entirely helpless.

  He was one of the last passengers to step through the gate. He paused on the other side of the fence, looked around, and spotted the cardboard sign I was holding. A brief smile of relief, then he walked over to me.

  “I’m Omar al-Baz,” he said, holding out his hand. “You must be Mr. Ramsey.”

  “Yes, I’m your guide. Call me Jim.” Not wanting to shake a hand that just wiped a mouth which had just spilled yuck all over nice clean concrete, I reached forward to relieve him of his bag.

  “I can carry this myself, thank you,” he said, not letting me take his bag from him. “But if you could help me with the rest of my luggage, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure. No problem.” He hadn’t hired me to be his porter, and if he’d been the jerk variety of tourist some of my former clients had been, I would’ve made him carry his own stuff. But I was already beginning to like the guy: early 50s, skinny but with the beginnings of a pot belly, coarse black hair going grey at the temples. He wore round spectacles and had a bushy mustache beneath a hooked aquiline nose, and looked a little like an Arab Groucho Marx. Omar al-Baz couldn’t have been anything but what he was, an Egyptian-American professor from the University of Arizona.

  I led him toward the terminal, stepping around the tourists and business travelers who had also disembarked from the 3 P.M. shuttle. “Are you by yourself, or did someone come with you?”

  “Unfortunately, I come alone. The university provided grant money sufficient for only one fare, even though I requested that I bring a grad student as an assistant.” He frowned. “This may hinder my work, but I hope that what I intend to do will be simple enough that I may accomplish it on my own.”

  I had only the vaguest idea of why he’d hired me to be his guide, but the noise and bustle of the terminal was too much for a conversation. Passenger bag
s were beginning to come down the conveyer belt, but Dr. al-Baz didn’t join the crowd waiting to pick up suitcases and duffel bags. Instead, he went straight to the PanMars cargo window, where he presented a handful of receipts to the clerk. I began to regret my offer to help carry his bags when a cart was pushed through a side door. Stacked upon it were a half-dozen aluminum cases; even in Martian gravity, none small enough to be carried two at a time.

  “You gotta be kidding,” I murmured.

  “My apologies, but for the work I need to do, I had to bring specialized equipment.” He signed a form, then turned to me again. “Now…do you have a means of taking all this to my hotel, or will I have to get a cab?”

  I looked over the stack of cases and decided that there weren’t so many that I couldn’t fit them all in the back of my jeep. So we pushed the cart out to where I’d parked beside the front entrance, and managed to get everything tied down with elastic cords I carried with me. Dr. al-Baz climbed into the passenger seat and put his suitcase on the floor between his feet.

  “Hotel first?” I asked as I took my place behind the wheel.

  “Yes, please…and then I wouldn’t mind getting a drink.” He caught the questioning look in my eye and gave me a knowing smile. “No, I am not a devout follower of the Prophet.”

  “Glad to hear it.” I was liking him better all the time; I don’t trust people who won’t have a beer with me. I started up the jeep and pulled away from the curb. “So…you said in your email you’d like to visit an aboriginal settlement. Is that still what you want to do?”

  “Yes, I do.” He hesitated. “But now that we’ve met, I think it’s only fair to tell you that this is not all that I mean to do. The trip here involves more than just meeting the natives.”

  “How so? What else do you want?”

  He peered at me over the top of his glasses. “The blood of a Martian.”

  When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was The War of the Worlds—the 1953 version, made about twelve years before the first probes went to Mars. Even back then, people knew that Mars had an Earthlike environment; spectroscopes had revealed the presence of an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, and strong telescopes made visible the seas and canals. But no one knew for sure whether the planet was inhabited until Ares I landed there in 1977, so George Pal had a lot of latitude when he and his film crew tried to imagine what a Martian would look like.