Beyond the Sun Read online

  Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  FAIRWOOD PRESS

  Bonney Lake, WA

  BEYOND THE SUN

  A Fairwood Press Book

  August 2013

  Copyright © 2013 Bryan Thomas Schmidt and in the names of the contributors

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

  by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

  or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Fairwood Press

  21528 104th Street Court East

  Bonney Lake, WA 98391

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Front cover image by MITCHELL DAVIDSON BENTLEY

  Book design by Patrick Swenson

  ISBN13: 978-1-933846-38-5

  First Fairwood Press Edition: August 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-208-2

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  COPYRIGHT NOTICES

  “Flipping The Switch” by Jamie Todd Rubin ©2013 Jamie Todd Rubin

  “Migration” by Nancy Kress ©2013 Nancy Kress

  “The Bricks of Eta Cassiopeiae” by Brad R. Torgersen ©2013 Brad R. Torgersen

  “Respite” by Autumn Rachel Dryden ©2013 Autumn Rachel Dryden (A previous draft was originally published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Issue 1, October 2005).

  “Parker’s Paradise” by Jean Johnson ©2012 G. Jean Johnson

  “Rumspringa” by Jason Sanford ©2007 Jason Sanford (Originally published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Issue 5, July 2007.)

  “The Far Side Of The Wilderness” by Alex Shvartsman ©2013 Alex Shvartsman

  “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen” by Cat Rambo ©2013 Cat Rambo

  “Inner Sphere Blues” by Simon C. Larter ©2013 Simon C. Larter

  “Dust Angels” by Jennifer Brozek ©2013 Jennifer Brozek

  “Voice Of The Martyrs” by Maurice Broaddus ©2013 Maurice Broaddus

  “One Way Ticket” by Jaleta Clegg ©2013 Jaleta Clegg

  “The Gambrels Of The Sky” by Erin Hoffman ©2013 Erin Hoffman

  “The Dybbyk of Mazel Tov IV” by Robert Silverberg ©1973 Agberg, Inc. (Originally published in Wander Stars, 1974.)

  “Chasing Satellites” by Anthony R. Cardno ©2013 Anthony R.Cardno

  “A Soaring Pillar Of Brightness” by Nancy Fulda ©2013 Nancy Fulda

  “The Hanging Judge” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch ©2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Observation Post” by Mike Resnick ©2013 Mike Resnick

  For Bob, Mike, Nancy and Kris, whose stories have delighted me for years and who now additionally delight me with their friendship and support. I consider it an honor to call you friends. Thanks for being a part of this project.

  INTRODUCTION

  What lies beyond the sun? It’s a question that’s fascinated humankind for centuries.

  I remember sitting on my Grandma’s lap, reading together the scrapbooks she kept of every NASA mission in her lifetime. What might it be like to go to the stars, we wondered? What strange worlds and alien life forms might exist out there? She gave me a phonograph recording of the first moon landing, which also included President John F. Kennedy’s famous “Land a man on the moon” speech. I listened to it over and over and dreamed.

  And then they downsized NASA and, with it, possibilities but not my dreams. I still think going to the stars would be amazing. I still imagine all the discoveries awaiting us out there, so I thought it would be fun to take you with me. That’s where the idea for this anthology, Beyond The Sun, came from.

  Within these pages, you’ll find stories of adventure, stories of action, stories of science, stories of exploration—some from the point of view of men, others the point of view of women, and a few from the point of view of aliens—which depending on who you are may seem synonymous with one of the genders I mentioned before. There’s humor here, too. From a lot of fun friends I invited to take this adventure with me—legends like Grand Master Robert Silverberg, award winners like Nancy Kress, Mike Resnick, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, newcomers like Anthony Cardno, and established writers like Cat Rambo, Jason Sanford and Jamie Todd Rubin, these stories explore the question: what lies beyond the sun? And what would it be like if we could go there?

  From the pilots who transport colonists to the stars to the families and coworkers who go with them, from missionaries to inmates, outpost crews to scientists and even a judge, the stories cover a broad spectrum, including action, emotion, tragedy, humor, and yes, some science. Mike Resnick and Erin Hoffman offer stories from alien points of view, while others stories follow the colonizers. Each story posits possibilities of what we might expect or experience out there. Some have settled on colonies for religious freedom or to escape persecution, others seek wealth, resources, or adventure. Our tales involve both those who live in colonies, those who run them and those who travel around assisting colonists with various needs. Each author puts a unique spin on the concept, which is what I think makes them a fun read.

  Maybe someday we’ll go together to the stars. In a form beyond simply our imaginations, that is. For now, join me on an adventure of the imagination. You may be surprised where it takes you. I know I enjoyed finding out. And I hope you’ll enjoy the journey as much as I did.

  Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Ottawa, KS

  Spring 2013

  No journey to the stars could begin without a starship, and so we continue our journey with a tale about one of those without whom colonization of the stars will never happen: a colonial ship pilot, called upon to take an adventure and sacrifice life at home, until he begins realizing the cost. Did he make the right decision? Would you choose the same? What would you do if you had the option to flip the switch? Jamie Todd Rubin’s story touched my heart. I hope it moves you as well.

  Welcome to Freedom, a Libertarian society, the only planet in the Coalition where genetic engineering is not only allowed but common. But that hasn’t changed things for the pupcats, with their drive to migrate yearly back to the ice from which they came. Shipped off planet, captured, sold, many suffer and die each year from being kept away, so Lukas has come to put a stop to it. Only his own connection to them and their suffering is far more personal than anyone else could imagine . . . Philip K. Dick Award nominee and multiple Hugo and Nebula winner Nancy Kress launches our journey together with a surprising errand.

  MIGRATION

  NANCY KRESS

  The night before the Far Sun Princess made orbit around Freedom, First Officer David Bridges knocked on the door of Lukas’s cabin. Bridges, who had spent thirty years ferrying colonists and visitors to unimportant, hard-scrabble planets, had fantastically wrinkled skin, solitary habits, and kind eyes. Lukas puzzled him.

  “May I come in?”

  “Please, sir.” The boy, quiet and polite, stood aside to let him enter. Even with the bed folded up against the wall, most of the small space was filled with a miniscule table, one chair, and Lukas’s half-packed bag. He and Bridges filled the rest of it.

  “Son, it may not be my place to say anything, but . . . you have family waiting for you on Freedom?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then you’ve picked an odd plac
e to emigrate to.”

  The boy looked down at the deck and said nothing. Twenty or twenty-one, skinny, he had work-roughened hands and a sweet smile, which he was unaware of.

  “I don’t mean just the planet itself. Is there a job waiting for you?” Lukas looked an unlikely candidate for the types of jobs on a pioneer planet.

  “No, sir.”

  “You understand that they don’t take care of indigents down there? That the Three Settlements are completely Libertarian?”

  “I understand.”

  “Is anyone going to meet you at the spaceport?”

  “No, sir.”

  A note of impatience crept into Bridges’s voice. “Well, do you even know where you’re going?”

  Lukas raised his eyes to the officer’s. All at once he looked much older, and so much less sweet that Bridges was startled. “Yes, sir,” Lukas said. “I know exactly where I’m going.”

  *

  Only four people took the shuttle from the Far Sun Princess down to Freedom. The other three were immediately claimed by people awaiting them and whisked away in rovers. Lukas picked up his duffle and started walking. Just inside the door of the spaceport terminal, he stopped to stare at a cage of pupcats waiting export.

  The animals, the largest native species on Freedom, were the size of Airedales and vaguely resembled a cross between the two Earth creatures for which they’d been named. Lukas studied their large heads, rounded bodies, huge dark eyes. It was an accident of evolution that their proportions echoed those of kittens even into adulthood. That large head held a specialized, though non-sentient brain. Those rounded bodies stored fat for life on the Ice. The big eyes evolved to see on Freedom’s dim farside. Popular as pets on the nearest Coalition worlds, they looked so cute that humans inevitably broke into smiles around them.

  Lukas did not smile.

  He picked up his duffle, left the building, and started walking toward Deoxy. The gravity, slightly higher than one gee, did not slow him down. A warm wind from the desert blew through his hair.

  Freedom lay close to its red-dwarf sun. Tidally locked, one face lay in perpetual, baking sunshine; the other was the Ice. Constant winds blew from the warmth to the Ice, and a permanent rainstorm raged at the equator. Along the northern-hemisphere terminator, with its comparatively milder weather, lay Freedom’s three major settlements: Deoxy, Ribo, and Nucleic. Tourists thought the names were whimsical. They were not. Freedom, founded by serious Libertarians and so without government or laws, was the only planet in the Coalition where genetic engineering of humans, or the humans who resulted, was allowed. If you were born genemod on Freedom, you stayed on Freedom. There was no way to pass Purity Control at any spaceport on any other world.

  Lukas trudged along the unpaved rover path, through scrub bushes of dull purple, and then among the foamcast buildings and bright holo signs of Deoxy. The glossy tourist hotels lay along the river; here was the frontier combination of crude structures and sophisticated technology. Without zoning laws, people built as they chose on land purchased from the Coalition charter company, which afterward left them alone. Capitalism on Freedom was a pure thing, even if genes were not.

  An hour and a half later, Lukas pushed through the heavy door of Rosen’s Bar on the western edge of town. Rosen’s, whose door was supposed to keep out blowing grit and did not, was barely furnished with uncushioned foamcast chairs, plain tables, and unpainted concrete walls. The local color all came from the patrons.

  “What’ll you have?” growled the bartender. His skin, light purple, might have been a genetic mistake or the fanciful genemod wish of a parent. Either way, he had obscured most of it with inlaid metals. The result looked like a robot with leprosy.

  “Local beer,” Lukas said, and received a mug of some reddish liquid he didn’t drink. His back to the bar—usually the safest stance in a place like this—he surveyed the room.

  Two women at a table, both preternaturally beautiful, absorbed in each other under the furtive, envious gaze of several men. The blonde had four arms. The redhead’s movements were so quick that she had to have augmented muscles and reflexes, which might be why they could drink here without being bothered.

  The other people looked human standard, but of course most genemods didn’t show. That man ordering another beer, that couple laughing together, could have any number of physical or mental alterations. Lukas had read all he could, before leaving New Europe and Aunt Carrie, huddled on their living room floor between tears and rage, her gray hair as tangled as the explanations that Lukas would not, could not, give her.

  He didn’t want to think about Aunt Carrie.

  “Happen you going to actually drink that, boy?” said the big man beside him at the bar.

  Lukas tensed. This was why he’d come.

  “Yes, sir.” He took a tiny sip. “Buy you one?”

  “Why?”

  A mistake. The trapper’s blue eyes—for of course he was a trapper, with that fat-storing genemod build designed for endurance and insulation on the Ice—stared at him suspiciously. Lukas had read that suspicion was built into Freedom culture. With no laws, the only protection was personal vigilance.

  “I’d like to hear about the Ice,” Lukas said.

  It was evidently the right answer—direct, supplicatory, unthreatening—especially with Lukas’s slight build. An even trade, in a Libertarian society built on unrestricted trade. The trapper relaxed.

  “Buy me two,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “How many trips have you made onto the Ice?”

  “Eleven. Eight mating seasons in a row, skip two years, then three more.”

  “Did you capture many pupcats?”

  “Happen thirty-eight in all.”

  “A trip lasts four months, right?”

  “It do.” The trapper drained his first beer and set the mug back on the counter. “You think you want to go onto the Ice.”

  “Yes. I can—”

  “You can’t do nothing. You think I’d take an untrained whelp? And you think the pupcat trade happen make you rich? Nobody don’t get rich except the export company!”

  “I know,” Lukas said. “But I can do any grubby work you want. I’m stronger than I look, I can cook, I can haul, I have a lot of experience caring for baby pupcats.”

  “We don’t like liars on Freedom, whelp.”

  “I’m not lying. I was raised on New Europe, with pupcats as pets. Ask me anything about their care.” He did not say that, of course, both animals had died.

  “Pets! And you think that fits you for the Ice?” The trapper threw back his head and gave a huge laugh, both artificial and sour. Then he gulped his second beer, shot Lukas a look of utter contempt, and walked off.

  It was no more than Lukas had expected. So—back to the original plan.

  He bartered with the bar owner to scrub the whole place in return for meals, for two nights sleeping on the floor, and for two hours’ use of the owner’s wife’s Link. The next two days, he scrubbed. Everything was filthy, the bathrooms beyond disgusting. Lukas worked meticulously. In the evenings, ignoring aches in muscles unaccustomed to the postures of cleaning floors and toilets, he spent his last few coins in other bars, buying others beers, asking questions, and listening listening listening.

  By the time the bar shone like silky white fur, he had his information.

  *

  Deoxy was full of tourists; the migration was due in a few days. Pupcats spent half of the year on the Ice. The other half, they migrated east to the terminator, feeding on fish and plants until their bodies grew round and waddley as the plush toys they so much resembled. Nourished, they migrated back onto the Ice to spawn. Trappers needed to take them as babies; the adults were impossible to domesticate, and the teeth in those adorable pink mouths were sharp and efficient. But if taken right after birth, the infants would imprint on humans.

  Lukas passed a roverbus of tourists about to se
t out for the pupcats’ feeding grounds. They were laughing and raucous, drinking redbeer, demanding from the driver to know if he was genemod—a seriously impolite question on Freedom but the other reason that tourists came at all. Lukas ignored them.

  He found the clinic on Galt Street, among warehouses and motor depots. Small, shabby, the kind of place used by poorer people who’d saved hard to modify one embryo for the one child they could afford. From the stories Lukas had heard the last two days, Theobald Garner produced reliable results but invented a certain number of non-existent expenses along the way. His patrons, having started the genemod process, could not afford to switch clinics halfway through and so were stuck.

  Lukas had heard other things, too. But, then, he’d already known them.

  He lurked outside as, one by one, techs left the building. The staff, according to his Link research, numbered five. They all left. Lukas knew what Theobald Garner looked like. As the man, whistling, turned to e-lock his door, Lukas tackled him.

  Garner was not genemod for strength, nor anything else. The attack bore him backwards into the clinic, and then Lukas straddled him, laser gun at his throat. “I want to talk to you. No, don’t move so much as a tendon.” The man might be able to summon private police, the only kind on Freedom.

  Garner was still.

  With his other hand, never taking his eyes from the man, Lukas undressed him down to his undershorts. If Garner had been braver, this would have been more difficult. He found the police call. “Does it activate if it’s away from skin? No, don’t wriggle—does it?”