Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Read online

  Tales of the Continuing Time

  And Other Stories

  Daniel Keys Moran

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Notices

  Introduction

  The Shepherds 2049

  Interlude 2049 - 2485

  Leftbehind 2485 - 2489

  Interlude 2489 - 2676

  The Shivering Bastard at Devnet 2676

  A Son Enters, Stage Right 2681

  Interlude - 2681 to 2821

  Smile and Give Me a Kiss 2821 - 2873

  Platformer 3021 - 3022

  Realtime with Gladys Prebehalla

  The Gray Maelstrom

  Given the Game

  Strings

  Play Date

  Sideways

  What Is And Is Not True

  Uncle Jack

  Old Man

  A Conversation in the Kitchen With Her Father

  Hell, Next Five Exits

  All Possible Worlds

  Dedication

  THIS IS FOR Connor Keys Stout Moran. I love you forever.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS IS FOR you guys. I’m going to omit some names because I'm old and forgetful, but even though your name didn’t end up on here, I really meant you.

  If you’d told me as a kid that I’d start a pretty good writing career, go away for a couple decades to change diapers, then start trickling out material again, and 38 years after writing my first story would have people excited to see a new book? That would have sounded like a great life to me ... and it has been. So this is for all of you who kept reminding me, or volunteered to proof, or just kept nudging me. Actually naming people is always treacherous, because I’m going to miss people – somewhere in the high hundreds of you have written over the years, maybe more than a thousand, and I’m all your debt, all of you. But apologizing in advance for those I miss, writing this at 3 A.M. on Saturday morning in the middle of December:

  Dave Aitel, Enrique Alvarez, Steven Barnes, John Beaty, Lysa Canino Bertsche, Stephen Bleezarde, Ken Burnside, Brad Daniels, Bradford Duncan, Dan Cutter, Daniel Dvorkin, Tracy Erickson, Sean Fagan, Solomon Foster, Sara Gabriella, Anne Gaw, Ehm Gee, David Gerrold, Nancy Godfrey, Rob Hansen, Glenn Hauman, Thaddeus Howze, Scott Hysmith, Eve M Jones, Jon Leech, Rachel Leland, Angel de Luz, Salil Maniktahla, Cheryl Martin, Brad Panoff, Yehuda Porath, Michael Roberts, Steve Perry, J.D. Ray, Eric Shivak, Amy Stout – I should say more here, except that it would take a hundred books – and Bob Urell, and Dan Verssen.

  And, of course, to Alex and Andrea and Bram and Richard and Connor. I don’t know who I’d have been without you. More books, yeah, but a desperately poorer man.

  Thank you all.

  Notices

  “Tales of the Continuing Time (and Other Stories)” is copyright © 2018 by Daniel Keys Moran. Individual pieces are copyright in their initial years of publication.

  The right of Daniel Keys Moran to be identified as the author of this collection has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Introduction

  THIS IS THIRTY-seven years of work.

  Not thirty-seven consecutive, of course. I’d have published a lot more books if I’d written instead of raising children all these years. But thirty-seven years first to last. I was nineteen when I wrote “The Gray Maelstrom,” and I was fifty-six, today, when I finished “A Son Enters, Stage Right.”

  So there are some not really intentional tonal shifts in the work. Can’t be helped, and probably doesn’t matter. The kid who wrote “Gray Maelstrom” isn’t me and hasn’t been for decades. He still entertains me, though, which helps; and he’s stopped embarrassing me, which also helps. (With the exception of the movie tie-in “The Ring,” I’ve never published anything that had flaws in it that I knew how to fix. My immediate response to my own work is almost always delight: this is some good stuff, world! And then I start to get some distance on it, and think, Oh, hell, that doesn’t work. And a few years after that, it’s actually painful to read that material. I don’t know if that’s progress, exactly, but it’s certainly the impact of distance.)

  But time continues to pass, relentlessly. The kid who wrote “Gray Maelstrom” and “Realtime” did the best work he knew how to do. He was younger than all but one of my five children, today. He was a good kid and when it came time to set aside writing to earn a living and raise children, he focused on what mattered and did. I’m not embarrassed by him these days.

  SOME GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.

  “The Shepherds” was the first Continuing Time story that almost sold. George Scithers liked it but felt that it implied too much and didn’t pay off. Some truth to that: some truth to that for all the Continuing Time stories, and the larger “Great Wheel” that encompasses the Continuing Time. Just setting the scene gets difficult in shorter pieces.

  “Leftbehind” was not the first story I finished about Ola Blue; there were at least three that preceded it, all before I was twenty. They weren’t good, to be charitable. I wrote “Leftbehind” around 2005 or so, if I recall. Can’t date it any more thoroughly. This is its first proper publication.

  “The Shivering Bastard at Devnet” is a rewrite of an earlier piece. I merged it (along with “The Shepherds”) into “Lord November: The Man-Spacething War,” but I think it still holds up well as a standalone bit.

  I finished “A Son Enters, Stage Right,” earlier today.

  “Smile and Give Me a Kiss” was written around 2009.

  “Platformer” is one of the few stories I ever completely lost. I wrote the first draft of it as a kid – sixteen, maybe. On a typewriter, and it vanished into the mists of time. I wrote it again from scratch about 2015. The only phrase I am certain was in both versions of the story is “the girl from Earth.” The story – with its concern for gender switching and mutable identities and machine intelligences – differs less from that story I wrote at sixteen than you think. The later Continuing Time stories always had a strong Varley flavor to them.

  “Realtime” I wrote with Gladys Prebehalla when I was nineteen. She was a lady my mom’s age – about forty at the time, I think. (Odd looking back at her and seeing her, from this side of fifty, as a relatively young woman.) I was impressed with her wisdom and understanding of how people worked. I mostly wrote that story, which I expect shows, but the core idea was hers, and almost all the emotional complexity. It’s not like other things I wrote back then, and there are good reasons for that. It was the cover of the August 1984 issue of Isaac Asimov’ s Science Fiction Magazine.

  “The Gray Maelstrom” I wrote in an hour or two one day when I was nineteen. On a typewriter, corrected two typos by hand, and sent it off to “Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.” To this day the most painless publishing experience I ever had. George Scithers bought it and it ran in the February 1983 issue.<
br />
  “Given the Game” was the cover story of “Aboriginal Science Fiction Magazine,” the Nov-Dec 1990 issue.

  “Strings” is the first of what might be several stories set in a world where everyone had uploaded into a virtual world. Haven’t written the sequels yet, but never say never.

  “Play Date” came about because when my kids were young we kept driving out to San Bernardino so that they could play with their cousin Kevin.

  “Sideways” was a nasty little comment on modern American politics. Wrote it around 2016.

  “What Is and Is Not True” came about because I was asked to write a Cthulhu story back in 2013. I was wavering on it when my son, then about thirteen, said Cthulhu sounded like something out of a Star Trek story. “Cthulhu! Take the controls!”

  “Uncle Jack” I wrote for an anthology of new short fiction tied to the “John Carter of Mars” movie back in 2012. A chance to write a Burroughs story, sort of.

  “Old Man” is my favorite of all my work. Wrote it back in 2002 or so, after my father passed.

  “A Conversation in the Kitchen With Her Father” is from around 2010.

  “Hell, Next Five Exits” is probably the piece I’ve had the most fun writing. It’s a fantasy set in a small universe that’s all of existence after the collapse of the Great Wheel. I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before in fantasy – sketched out three broad arcs, of which “Hell, Next Five Exits” is the first. They’re pure fantasy, Western influenced, and set in an ancient civilization that has risen and fallen and risen again dozens of times.

  One of the proofers for “All Possible Worlds” called the main character a “Gary Stu,” which if you haven’t run into the phrase before, is an author writing themselves into a story and making themselves look good. Guilty. I went blind in my right eye about 2004, so I wrote a story about a man who was blind and still really cool.

  I mean, I do look good in an eyepatch.

  STARING AT AN imminent empty nest, I’m grateful so many of my readers have followed along with me all these years. I may have twenty or thirty good, productive years left – or may not. Life’s a crap shoot, at that level. But whatever’s left, I still have work that calls to me. I’ve been as fortunate as anyone could reasonably ask for, in one life.

  December 13, 2018

  Tales of the

  Continuing Time

  Prolog to “The Shepherds”

  IT WAS JANUARY ninth, in the year 2291 A.D., when Ares November came to Earth for the second and last time. His shuttle landed on the southern tip of the Glass Desert of Manhattan, and Ares disembarked and stood there in a gentle, drifting snow, smelling the air of Earth.

  Movement caught his eye.

  Three cars blasted into the skies over the glass island, broke into a hovering circle over the shuttle that had brought Ares down, paused, and dropped down to the ground in an equilateral triangle with Ares November at its center.

  A single car cracked open, and a small, compact man with a bushy mustache stepped out. He half-trotted across the landing pad, to Ares. “Ser November? I’m Xavier Le Thour.” He started to offer his hand, but withdrew it before Ares would have had a chance to take it. “Would you come with me, please? The Regent is waiting for you.”

  ARES SAT QUIETLY in the back seat. He paid little attention to the scenery; much of it was familiar from his last trip to Earth, seven years ago. It was all striking enough, to be sure, from the glass desert that was all that remained of old Manhattan, to the wooded coastline of northern New York, where genegineers and Earth’s declining population had restored the coastline to a semblance of what the Pilgrims had seen upon their arrival here, sixty-seven decades ago. But he had seen it before and today Ares November had concerns of his own.

  His reverie was finally broken by group of buildings built along the shoreline. They sprawled half above and half below the waterline, to bring Church services to humans and dolphins alike. They were a bright scarlet presence in the cold winter sunshine, a cluster of ten-sided buildings branded with the double-decahedron icon of the Zaradin Church.

  It was a small enough thing. The pilot, a United Earth Intelligence operative who seemed to trust largely to her own good sense in flight, who had ignored Manhattan flight clearances and the Coast Guard’s multiple complaints about violation of their airspace, veered away from Zaradin airspace without even being warned.

  Ares closed his eyes, troubled. He was a November of November, and the Zaradin Church had not yet attempted to establish itself on November itself.

  Perhaps they wouldn’t.

  The hovercar flew north.

  The Shepherds

  2049

  1

  ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2049, a starship of the Zaradin Church exited Sol System’s Second Gate.

  Not just any starship; this was a Cathedral, one of nine to be found in the galaxy. Sol’s Second Gate lies outside the orbit of Saturn, and far off the ecliptic; but had the Cathedral stayed at the Second Gate long enough, darkened though it was, humanity would have found it in time, through its gravitational disturbance upon the orbits of the other bodies in the System. It was that large.

  The Dalmastran who crewed the Cathedral did not plan to stay long enough for that to happen. They had more important business than this minor matter, the collection of a species that had so recently begun to boast of its existence, pouring radio waves and television and lasers indiscriminately out into the interstellar darkness. They did not want their existence known to humanity – not out of any concern for humanity’s reaction, but because they did not want the sleem empire to know they had passed this way.

  And as they had already observed, humans were distressingly disinclined to keep silent about themselves, or, the Dalmastran presumed, about those they met.

  The Dalmastran concern about the Empire might have been over-cautious; some in the Church thought so. True, the sleem had been growing restless, had more than once recently interfered in the travel of the Church’s emissaries. But it was a grand leap, to go from harassing the servants of the Church, to interfering with the business of one of the great Cathedrals.

  The Dalmastran did not think that the Empire would be so foolish – but the sleem had been disturbingly arrogant of late, and the Dalmastran had been taught by the Zaradin to avoid confrontation over matters not involving theology.

  They studied the Solar System for several days, its scattering of planets, moons and asteroids and comets; listened to the broadband echoes of radio and television and InfoNet, and came to their decision.

  A Missionary fell in toward the Sun.

  PETER JANSSEN FOLLOWED a Hoffman trajectory, heading down to an orbit some 125,000 kilometers above the cloudy surface of Jupiter. He was already 240,000 klicks above the clouds, and dropping; it put him well inside the orbit of all Jupiter’s satellites except Amalthea. His target was an observation buoy he had dropped into Jupiter’s atmosphere with seven others, a week past. This buoy was the only one to successfully blast itself back up into space, and unless Janssen snagged it on this pass, the buoy would drop helplessly back into Jupiter’s lethal atmosphere, burning up on re-entry, losing its atmospheric samples and whatever data had not made it through via telemetry.

  He had to pick up the buoy on his first pass because his margin of delta-V was close to nonexistent. His craft, a modified Chandler BlackSmith, had heavy radiation shielding to protect him from Jupiter’s deadly and incessant radiation storms. (That was only one of the dozens of ways that Jupiter duty was different from the Earth-Luna runs of wh
ich Janssen, an ex-SpaceFarer, was a veteran. Bar the odd sunstorm, cis-Lunar space is largely free of radiation hazards. Around Earth-Luna, shielding is more a drawback than an asset. Most solar radiation passes straight through the human body without damaging it. Moderate shielding is actually worse than none; cascading secondary radiation from light shielding is worse for the human body than the primary solar radiation against which it is designed to protect.)

  Because Peter Janssen’s slipship was so heavily shielded his delta-V was correspondingly reduced; his slipship massed half again what Chandler Industries had intended.

  He whistled tunelessly as he made final approach to the buoy. They were awaiting him eagerly back at the settlement on Ganymede – well, the research scientists were. Or rather, he corrected himself, the research scientists were eagerly awaiting his return of their buoy.

  Whatever. At least someone was looking forward to seeing him.

  Peter knew he was not a popular man, both moody and irritable. While at St. Peter’s CityState, he had missed Luna; and now that he was at Ganymede, he missed the CityState. He brooded at times that his life in the last few years had been a series of increasingly poor decisions, made increasingly at random. Most of those who knew him these days had never seen him smile.

  Those same people would have been surprised to see the change that had come over him now. A grin played across his lips; his eyes drooped closed and he lay slackly in the webbed padding of the pilot’s enclosure.

  He was the slip.

  The ship cameras were his eyes, fed video to his inskin, and he drifted alone inside a glowing cathedral of stars. For all he had learned to hate Jupiter, it had the loveliest sky in the System; Amalthea and Ganymede and Europa hung behind him in the view from his rear holocams: a gray potato; a whole ocean covered world; and on Europa, a delicate tracery of rust on white, the smallest of the Galilean moons.