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Jim Baen’s Universe

Edited by Eric Flint

Vol. 1 Number 1, June 2006

CONTENTS

SF

Chilling

BOW SHOCK

Pimpf

What Would Sam Spade Do?

Brieanna’s Constant

Bob’s Yeti Problem

Slanted Jack

Candy-Blossom

The Darkness

Fantasy

The Cold Blacksmith

Poga

Build-a-Bear

The Opposite of Pomegranates

'Ware the Sleeper

The Thief of Stones

Classic Stories

Light of Other Days

The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut

Serials

The Ancient Ones

Travails With Momma

Fish Story, Part 1

Introducing New Authors

Fancy Farmer

The Puzzle of the Peregrinating Coach

Astromonkeys

Giving it 14%

Local Boy Makes Good

Non Fiction

Gods and Monsters In Holywood

Back to the Moon!

Columns

Publisher’s Podium

The Editor's Page

Salvos Against Big Brother

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 5TH OF FEBRUARY 1841

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN A COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 6TH OF APRIL 1842.

Singularity Watch

The Gutenberg Column

June 1, 2006

Table of Contents

Science Fiction Stories

· Chilling by Alan Dean Foster

· Bow Shock by Gregory Benford

· Pimpf by Charlie Stross

· What Would Sam Spade Do? by Jo Walton

· Brieanna's Constant by Eric Witchey

· Bob's Yeti Problem by Lawrence Person

· Slanted Jack by Mark L. Van Name

· Candy- Blossom by Dave Freer

· The Darkness by David Drake

Fantasy Stories

· The Cold Blacksmith by Elizabeth Bear

· Poga by John Barnes

· Build- A-Bear by Gene Wolfe

· The Opposite of Pomegranates by Marissa Lingen

· ‘Ware the Sleeper by Julie Czerneda

· The Thief of Stones by Sarah Zettel

Classic

· Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw

· The Facts Concerning The Recent Carnival Of Crime In Connecticut by Mark Twain

Serials - parts and parts

· The Ancient Ones Part 1 by David Brin

· Travails with Momma by John Ringo

· Fish Story, Episode 1 by Andrew Dennis, Eric Flint and Dave Freer

Introducing: Stories by new authors

· Fancy Farmer by Pamela Uphoff

· The Puzzle of the Peregrinating Coach by George Phillies

· Astromonkeys! by Tony Frazier

· Giving it 14 Percent by Ani Fox

· Local Boy Makes Good by Ray Tabler

NonFiction articles

· Gods and Monsters in Hollywood by Gregory Benford

· Back to the Moon by Travis Taylor

Columns

· Why Die? by Jim Baen

· The Editor's Page by Eric Flint

· Salvos Against Big Brother by Eric Flint

· Singularity Watch by Mark L. Van Name

· The Gutenberg Column by Michael Hart

Jim Baen's Universe is copyright 2006, Baen Publishing Enterprises.

Individual stories are copyright 2006 by their authors.

Science Fiction Stories

Chilling

Alan Dean Foster

You stupid idiot, you’ve killed us!”

Arik looked over at his new wife. “I love you too.”

They sat on opposite sides of the cave. It was not much of a cave. At its highest the ceiling barely allowed him enough room to stand, and it could not have been more than six or seven meters wide. But compared to the frozen, howling wilderness outside it might as well have been the Garden of Eden. Strange fungal growths carpeted the surface of the interior with a subdued cerulean radiance while coiled flowerless scrubs no higher than a man’s knee clustered as close to the bubbling central pool as possible. Twitching yellow-brown tendrils hung from the ceiling, reaching toward the heat. While individual specimens occasionally emitted a soft whistle, without pulling one free from its perch and taking it apart Arik was unable to tell if they were plant or animal. Jen refused to touch them.

One of several thermal springs that dotted the tiny island on which the cave was located, the hot pool was what was keeping the two humans as well as the exotic flora alive. While certain specialized growths like pika-pina and the much larger pika-pedan flourished out on the bare frozen oceans of Tran-ky-ky, rarer flora like the orange fiesin were restricted to locales where the ice world’s internal heat reached the surface. The cloud of steam generated by one such thermal vent was what had initially drawn him and Jen to the island. A sister spring was also the cause of their present predicament.

Sitting back against the wall of the cave with his knees drawn up to his chest and his bare hands extended toward the life-preserving warmth of the bubbling spring, Arik reflected that their present desperate situation was not wholly his fault. The Tran who had rented them the small native iceboat should have provided more detailed advice about the possible dangers to be encountered out on the frozen ocean. Or perhaps he had, and Arik’s translator had failed to interpret everything. The latter was not an impossibility. Not on a world that had only recently applied for associate Commonwealth membership, where the sale and use of advanced technology was still forbidden to the local sentients, and where along with so much else the study of the strongly guttural native language was still in its infancy.

Jen looked across at him. Having slipped out of the cheap daysuit, she was sitting nearly naked next to the pool. She would gladly have immersed herself if not for the fact that even at the edges its surface temperature was close to boiling.

Some choice they had, he mused. Poach in the pool inside the cave or freeze in the air outside it.

“We’re not dead yet.” He tried to reassure her.

“Might as well be.” She was chewing on a fingernail. Because of the hot spring the air inside the cave was warm enough for them to remove their protective daysuits. Outside - outside was another matter entirely. Another world, in every sense of the word. Tran-ky-ky’s vast oceans were frozen solid to varying but usually considerable depths, e
xposed earth crackled and snapped beneath one’s boots, a gust of wind sent sharp pain racing through exposed eyes, and on a more intimate note the moisture in a person’s nose caused the hairs to freeze almost instantly on contact with the air.

They had arrived as passengers on a wide-ranging interstellar transport, intending to visit this new outpost of the Commonwealth only for the couple of days the KK-drive craft spent off-loading cargo. When it reentered space plus on its way to the next system, they would go with it. It was a journey as unorthodox as it was costly. Interstellar travel was too expensive and time-consuming to allow people to journey lazily from system to system. Citizens traveled from point to point with very definite destinations in mind.

The atypical postwedding journey was a present from their respective families, each of whom happened to be quite wealthy. All the credit in the Commonwealth, however, had not prevented the new couple’s rented iceboat from sinking.

How was he to have known that a subsurface fumarole had melted and weakened the ice close to the island where they had decided to come ashore? Or that anything called a “boat” would promptly sink when exposed to open water? In retrospect, of course, it all made perfect if disheartening sense. Designed to skim across the frozen sea on runners chiseled from solid marblelike stone, the craft had been built to skate, not to float. Why would anyone on Tran-ky-ky build something capable of floating when there was no open water for it to float upon? It was solid ice everywhere, solid ice all the time. Even if the material of which the iceboat had been fashioned had been sufficiently buoyant, the craft still would have been dragged down by the weight of its stone runners.

They had set out for the day trip from the outpost of Brass Monkey. Located not far north of the planetary equator, it was the headquarters of the sole humanx settlement on the planet. Journey farther north, they had been told, and the climate made functioning difficult for even those humans equipped with modern arctic gear. Far to the east lay the enormous volcano whose Tran name translated as The-Place-Where-the-Earth’s-Blood-Burns. According to the small but steadily expanding information file on Tran-ky-ky, between the volcano and the mountainous lands of Arsudun where Brass Monkey was located lay a multitude of small islands. Some of these were home to distinctive biological environments abounding with endemic species, many of which had yet to be identified and scientifically described. The island on which they currently found themselves marooned was one such outpost of unique indigenous biological diversity.

He estimated that it was just past noon local time. He had to estimate because their communicators had gone down with the iceboat. He chose not to try to guess the temperature outside the cave. When they had arrived at the island his communicator had declared that the temperature was minus twenty-one centigrade with a wind chill double, possibly triple that. Cold enough to kill. Tonight it would drop to that point. Tomorrow morning - tomorrow it might not matter. Like everything else they had brought with them, their self-heating meals had gone down with the iceboat. Having been raised in a privileged family where only the quality and never the quantity of the food he had eaten had ever been in question he had no idea how long a person could survive sans nourishment. Even in the semiprotected environment of the cave.

Of course, if the spring that supplied the hot pool turned out to be inconsistent and chose to stop bubbling for awhile, the heat it provided would be quickly sucked from the small cavern. They would die swiftly and without having to worry about food.

“Visit some of the Commonwealth’s most exotic locations before we settle down on Earth, you said. Experience the hard-to-see worlds while we’re still young enough to do so in comfort, you said.”

Muttering under her breath, Jen moved her feet closer to the bubbling pool. She wished she could ease her legs into the boiling water. Arik felt it was too risky. Reluctantly, she agreed with him. If the temperature rose suddenly she ran a real risk of being scalded. She had to settle for scooping her hands quickly in and out of the water and splashing her face and body.

“I didn’t hear any violent objections from you when the trip was being organized,” he shot back.

“I had this, in retrospect, unreasonable expectation that you might know what you were doing.” One hand gestured in the direction of the cave opening. Outside, the wind sang subzero. “You could at least have had the sense to bring along our gear pack when we got off the boat.”

Said gear pack, which held all their food, drinks, chemical reaction space heater, and most important of all any means of communicating with civilization, had gone down with the iceboat when it had fallen through the thin pane of ice that had been undermined by the hidden fumarole. At least they had water, though they dared not drink directly from the effervescent pool. It reeked of sulfur and other minerals. For all they knew, it was rich in dissolved arsenic. So they grabbed snow from outside the cave entrance and held it in their hands just above the hot mineral water until it melted.

They did not even have a cup, he reflected morosely.

“I didn’t see you carrying anything off the boat when we came ashore,” he reminded her accusingly.

“I didn’t think we’d be here more than ten or fifteen minutes,” she countered unhappily. “Half an hour at most.”

He saw no point in arguing further. Mutual accusations accomplished nothing. Half an hour maximum. That had been the plan. It was no one’s fault, certainly not his, that the subheated ice had given way beneath the modest weight of their iceboat. If they had been traveling airborne, now, in a proper skimmer… But the use of such advanced technology outside the boundaries of the station was forbidden.

He’d had no trouble navigating the simple single-sail iceboat. An experienced open-water sailor, he had found the native rigging not so very different from that of a small sailing vessel back home. The native Tran had been using multiple permutations of such craft for centuries. He and Jen had even had the opportunity to take a tour of its most recent elaboration, the massive icerigger Slanderscree that had been tied up in the harbor.

“Someone will find us,” he assured her more gently. “We were supposed to have been back late yesterday afternoon. The native who rented us the iceboat will have informed the proper authorities.”

Using spread fingers, she brushed out her shoulder-length blonde hair. Rich and beautiful, he thought as he looked at her. If someone did not find them today, by tomorrow she might be rich and dead. She would certainly make the more attractive corpse of the two.

“It’s one
thing for the people at the station to be informed that we’re missing,” she muttered unhappily. “It’s another for someone to find us.”

Rising, he walked around the small pool and sat down close to her. Her anger had moderated sufficiently so that this time she did not object. “Emergency position locators are designed to keep operating under severe conditions. Even submerged in ice water it could still be functioning.”

“Unless harsh chemicals from the hot vent corroded it as soon as it sank.”

Now why did she have to go and point that out, he asked himself? If their personal communicators and the locator that had been on the iceboat had failed, then no one would know where they were. While they had not traveled all that many kilometers from Brass Monkey, they had not sailed in a straight line. As tourists, they had taken their time and wandered around. They would be difficult to track even if the original angle of their departure had been observed and noted.

Unlike Jen, he had stayed dressed. Looking down, he checked the weather seals at wrists and ankles. The daysuit was designed to keep an individual comfortable while outside even in Tran-ky-ky’s climate. But the chemicals in the fabric that combined to generate heat when the suit was put on were intended to last no more than a couple of days. In contrast, a fully powered cold climate survival suit of the type worn by the scientists at the outpost would use a combination of solar, chemical, cell, and the body’s own internal heat to keep a traveler warm indefinitely.

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