Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  Universe 9

  Ed by Terry Carr

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  Frost Animals

  BOB SHAW

  Nuclear Fission

  PAUL DAVID NOVTTSKI

  Time Shards

  GREGORY BENFORD

  The Captain and the Kid

  MARTA RANDALL

  The Back Road

  MARY C. PANGBORN

  Will the Chill

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  Chicken of the Tree

  JULEEN BRANTINGHAM

  The White Horse Child

  GREG BEAR

  Options

  JOHN VARLEY

  * * * *

  Bob Shaw has built an impressive reputation as a writer of “traditional” science fiction stories that have the additional virtue of featuring believable characters with familiar human problems. He shows us the wonders of tomorrow as colorfully as anyone, but the view is always through the eyes of a human being who is strongly affected by postulated future changes. His short story “Light of Other Days,” which embodied these qualities in a notably moving way, became an instant classic when it appeared in 1966, and caused many sf readers to regard this “new” writer with surprise.

  What most readers didn’t realize was that Shaw had published half a dozen science fiction stories a decade before but had then stopped writing—and even sold his typewriter—because he felt he didn’t know enough about people to write the kind of stories he wished. He spent years working in non-literary fields and “studying the inhabitants of Sol III” before he took up writing again. Such dedication is rare in any field, but Shaw’s success in the past dozen-plus years is proof that it was worth it.

  “Frost Animals,” Shaw’s second story for Universe, provides a fine example of his abilities. It’s a fascinating narrative about a man newly returned from an interstellar trip who must deal with the temporal dislocation of returning to Earth after thirteen months of his own time while eighteen years have passed on Earth . . . and who finds he must defend himself against a charge of murder committed before his departure. The events in question are relatively fresh in his mind, but possible witnesses have either died in the meantime or have greatly changed.

  Bob Shaw’s novels include The Two-Timers, The Palace of Eternity, Orbitsville, and eight others. Two collections of his shorter stories have been published.

  * * * *

  FROST ANIMALS

  Bob Shaw

  The period of weightlessness had been very brief, but its psychological aftermath was profound. Hobart could see and hear the difference in his fellow officers as they moved about the upper deck’s rest room; and within himself he could feel a mixture of emotions—relief, expectation, nostalgia—which were going to make the remaining days of the voyage tedious. There was an irony in that fact, he realized. After weeks of steady deceleration the ship had cut its speed to a level at which the time dilation effect was negligible—but now his impatience to reach home had intervened to slow down subjective time. He was pondering the matter when the tall, angular figure of Harry Stiebel, the day exec, came into the room with a pile of fax sheets curved over his arm.

  “Earth is still there, folks,” Stiebel called in a professionally jovial voice. “Still abiding away for all it’s worth. That’s good to know, isn’t it? Hands up everybody who thought the Earth wouldn’t still be there.”

  “Why wouldn’t it still be there?” said Os Milburn, the chief systems engineer, who was seated near the door. “Eighteen years without your smart-assing around has probably rejuvenated the place.”

  “Have a reorientation kit, lover.” Stiebel threw a fluttering bundle of paper into Milburn’s lap and began working his way around the room, distributing the sheets with unnecessary vigor and a surprising amount of noise. Hobart watched his progress with affection and respect Stiebel was completing his fifth trip to the Sirian system, which meant he was more than a hundred years old in Earth chronology, yet he showed no symptoms of dislocation. Thin, square-shouldered, invariably cheerful, he seemed determined to diffuse his normal life span over as many centuries as company regulations and Albert Einstein would allow. It was an ambition of which Hobart stood in awe.

  “One for you, Denny,” Stiebel said as he reached Hobart. “See what you’ve been missing.”

  “Thanks.” Hobart took the proffered sheaf and began to flick through pages that clung together electrostatically. Switching off the main impulsion torch for two minutes had, as well as given the crew a warming glimpse of Earth, allowed communication to take place between the ship and the company headquarters in Montana, and the reorientation kits were part of the result. Their contents—fired through in a ten-second information bleep— were intended to familiarize the returning starmen with the major changes that had taken place during their absence. This was Hobart’s first voyage and as he glanced over the section headings on politics, world events, fashion, science, and sport, he tried to come to terms with the knowledge that in the past thirteen months of his own life the world and everybody in it had grown older by eighteen years. I’ve done it, he thought, bemusedly and proudly. I’ve traveled in space, and I’ve traveled in time. . ..

  “Before you delve in there and start checking on skirt lengths...” Stiebel paused long enough on his rounds to tap Hobart’s shoulder. “Take a walk into George’s office, will you? He wants to see you about some little thing.”

  “George wants to see me?” Hobart looked up at Stiebel in open surprise. As the most junior officer in the entire ship’s complement, he had been assigned a number of routine tasks, most of which were connected with monitoring erosion of the hull. There had been little enough actual work for him to do during the two acceleration phases of the voyage, and during retardation—when the ship was shielded against collisions with interstellar material by its own drive torch—there had been virtually no work at all. In any case, at no stage in the journey would Hobart have expected an individual summons from Captain George A. Mercier, commander of the Longer Willow.

  “What do you think George wants?” he said to Stiebel. “Did he say anything?”

  For a reply, Stiebel stared at him with slightly raised eyebrows then passed on his way, performing a menial administrative duty with gusto and an air of importance, the picture of the corporate space traveler. Hoping the exchange had not been overheard, Hobart stood up and glanced around him. He was a tall man with silver-blond hair and exceptionally clear skin, and he had always found it difficult to do things without being noticed. Several of the ship’s senior technical staff were watching him with amused expressions. There was no personal malice in their attitude, but he knew they were of a breed that firmly believed in the value of making life as irksome and embarrassing as possible for junior officers. Even if it were traditional at this stage of a trip for the captain to give a new man a drink and a clap on the back, nobody would have helped him by divulging the information in advance. Hobart nodded to the onlookers, left the rest room, and made his way along narrow corridors to the compartment Mercier used for office work and rare conferences. He tapped the door and immediately was told to enter.

  “Sit down, Hobart,” Mercier said, indicating a chair opposite the desk at which he was seated.

  “Thank you, sir.” Hobart lowered himself into the chair, noting as he did so that there was nobody else in attendance and that Mercier’s desk was almost completely clear, as if the captain had come to the room for no reason other than the present interview. Hobart gazed at Mercier, wondering if such a thing could be possible. The captain was a strongly built man of about fifty, with conservative good looks which, had he been an actor, wou
ld have typecast him as a judge or an insurance company president. He examined Hobart with frankly puzzled blue eyes and then, unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, gave a deep sigh.

  Hobart shifted in his seat. “Sir?”

  Mercier seemed to reach a decision. “I contacted you through the day executive, rather than the general address system, because there’s something going on here that I fail to understand, and I want to deal with it as discreetly as possible. Do you remember a junior technical officer called Craven? Wolf Craven?”

  “Yes, sir.” Hobart suppressed his uneasiness. The sudden mention of Craven’s name had aroused feelings of guilt, but they were associated with a personal matter, one which could hardly concern his professional life. “I know him quite well.” “

  “Were you friendly with him?”

  “I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that—we just happened to be in the same intake at Langer Center and went through our pre-ops course at the same time.”

  Mercier looked dissatisfied, the overhead light accentuating ridges in his forehead. “Have you ever been to any parties at Colonel Langer’s house?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was Craven at the same parties?”

  “Yes, but . . .” Hobart developed a conviction that somehow, against all the odds, the private degradation he had experienced with Wolf Craven on that last night on Earth was leading to unforeseen consequences. “Excuse me, sir—am I entitled to know what this is all about?”

  “I never went to any functions at the Langer place,” Mercier said reflectively. “Made a point of staying away from that sort of thing. Even in the old days.”

  Hobart was reminded of the fact that, as a veteran star-man, Captain Mercier had a memory which reached far back into the previous century. It was an incomplete memory, a thinly dotted line composed of months-long periods on Earth interspersed with decades in the relativistic limbo of the space traveler, but the span was there and it made Mercier different. Although the captain had lived some fifty years of body time, little more than twice as much as Hobart, he had a trick—possibly cultivated— of occasionally appearing to commune with eternity. In spite of his growing sense of alarm, Hobart was constrained to withhold his questions.

  “I believe there was a party the night before this voyage began,” Mercier said at length. “And that both you and Craven were present.”

  “Yes, but lots of company personnel were there.” Hobart began to wonder if he was making a mistake in going on the defensive before any charge had been made against him, but he pressed on. “We were leaving the next day, and the Langer Rowan—that’s Wolf Craven’s ship—was going out the day after that. It was”—he sought a form of words that might impress the captain—”a fairly significant social occasion.”

  “You didn’t speak to Craven at all?”

  “Well, I’m bound to have spoken to him at some time, at some stage.” Hobart tried to fend off an intrusive memory of Craven’s dark and cleft-chinned face, the too-red lips lacquered with saliva, the eyes pleading and derisive at the same time. “Sir, I’d like to know what’s going on.”

  “So would I, Hobart, so would I.” Mercier paused again, brooding. “We entered the Solar System near the top end of our speed envelope, which is why we had to resume deceleration so soon after the confirmation report There was only a minute or so, less the allowance for distance lag, for verbal communication—and I could have used that time in more productive ways than talking to the police.”

  “The police?” Hobart was both surprised and reassured, knowing there were no criminal activities on his conscience. He made a show of relaxing visibly.

  “Yes—the police. This is a serious matter, Hobart.”

  “I can’t think why the...”

  “They seem to be of the opinion that Wolf Craven was murdered during your fairly significant social occasion.” Mercier paused again, giving Hobart’s own phrase time to rebound on him. “And, from what was said, you appear to be the chief suspect.”

  Hobart suddenly became aware that the structure of the ship was alive, that stress patterns and subtle harmonics were coursing through the walls of the room, agitating the air which surrounded him. He could hear it whispering in his ears.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said forcibly, then secondary implications came to his mind. “Is Wolf Craven really dead?”

  “I presume the police wouldn’t be talking about murder otherwise.”

  “But I know nothing about it.”

  “You’d better not,” Mercier said gravely. “You know my way of going by this time, Hobart—if you’re innocent I’ll back you all the way, and you’ll get the same support I’d give to the most senior member of my crew, but if it turns out that you really are involved you’ll find me a bigger enemy than the public prosecutor. The company can’t afford this sort of thing.”

  “The company can’t afford it!” A lowering of the captain’s brow told Hobart he was failing to show proper deference, but such considerations no longer seemed important. “Look, I’m entitled to know exactly what was said.”

  “I’ve already told you more than I should,” Mercier replied, eying Hobart with fresh appraisal, as though suspecting that insolence in a junior officer could point to a capacity for more serious faults.

  Hobart shook his head. “Exactly what did the police say?”

  “First they checked that you were still alive and on the ship’s roster, then they requested me to put you in detention until we go into parking orbit.”

  “Detention?” The atmospheric whispering in Hobart’s ears grew louder and more malicious. “Are you going to do it?”

  “I’m obliged to.” Mercier pressed a call button on his desk. “It will be done discreetly, of course. All I expect of you is that you will remain in your quarters until the parking maneuvers are completed. I’m not proposing to put a guard on you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Hobart said bitterly. “Will I be handcuffed to the shuttle?”

  “You’ll no longer be my responsibility at that stage.” The puzzled look returned to Mercier’s eyes as he got to his feet, terminating the interview. “I don’t know what you’ve got yourself involved with, Hobart—but the police are going to the expense of sending up a transit vehicle just to take you off my hands.”

  * * * *

  Investigator Charles Shimming was a medium-sized, fit-looking man with a long face and intelligent, worried eyes. During conversation he had a habit of lowering his chin onto his chest, as though suppressing a series of belches, but continuing to speak anyway. This had the effect of making every utterance sound weighty and deliberate, if somewhat disjointed. It also had the effect of irritating Hobart, who wanted his information delivered quickly and clearly.

  “There are two ways we can handle this thing,” Shimming said in the privacy of Hobart’s room. “If you are reasonable and cooperative I won’t even have to place you under arrest, and we can walk—or should I say float?—out of here like two friends going off somewhere to have a couple of beers. I think that would be the best way to do it, but if you didn’t want to be reasonable and cooperative I could hit you with a spider, in which case...”

  “Hit me with a what?” Hobart scrutinized the policeman’s neat frame, looking for weapons.

  “I forgot you’ve been away eighteen years.” Shimming opened his right hand, revealing what looked like a silver golf ball. “This is a spider. If I threw it at you it would explode on contact and wrap you up in metal ribbons— same way some spiders truss up flies. It wouldn’t hurt, but you’d have to be carried off the ship all done up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and it would be bloody undignified. It would be really embarrassing for you.”

  “I see. Thanks for bringing me up to date.” Hobart pretended not to notice the threat which had been implicit in the description of the restraint system. “I would have co-operated with you anyway.”

  “That’s good.” Shimming made no move to put the silver ball away. “Shall we go?”
<
br />   “Don’t I get to hear what this is all about?”

  “Not now, not in here—it wouldn’t be considerate.”

  “Considerate?”

  “Yes. The ship has to remain officially sealed until I get you off, and it wouldn’t be fair to all the others if we caused unnecessary delays. They must be pretty anxious to get their feet back on the ground after all this time.”

  “Okay.” Unable to shake off a feeling he was being manipulated, Hobart detached his holdall from the spring clip which prevented it from drifting about the room. He glanced around the tiny compartment, scarcely able to believe he would not be spending the night in its familiar confines, and moved out into the corridor. It was a long time since he had walked in zero-gravity conditions with the aid of suction soles, and at first he swayed grotesquely as he made his way toward the transfer port. Shimming labored along behind him, obviously ill at ease, allowing too much suction to build up under his shoes and having to struggle to lift his feet clear of the deck. His progress was punctuated by popping noises and occasional bursts of subdued swearing.