Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95 Read online

  Hot Times in Magma City © 2013 by Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Interior design © 2013 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition

  978-1-59606-588-8

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “In the Clone Zone” first appeared in Playboy, March 1991.

  “Hunters in the Forest” first appeared in Omni, October 1991.

  “A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple” first appeared in After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, January 1992, edited by Martin H. Greenberg.

  “Thebes of the Hundred Gates” was first published by Axolotl/Pulphouse, January 1992. However, the version reproduced here is that of Bantam Spectra, July 1992, except for the beginning of Chapter Eleven to which a missing paragraph and quatrain is restored.

  “It Comes and Goes” first appeared in Playboy, January 1992. However, the version reproduced here is the Author’s original version.

  “Looking for the Fountain” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1992.

  “The Way to Spook City” first appeared in Playboy, August 1992.

  “The Red Blaze is the Morning” first appeared in New Legends, May 1995, edited by Greg Bear and Martin H. Greenberg.

  “Death Do Us Part” first appeared in Omni On-Line, December 1996. However, the version reproduced here is that which appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1997.

  “The Martian Invasion: Journals of Henry James” first appeared in Omni On-Line, May 1996. However, the version reproduced here is that which appeared in The War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, June 1996, edited by Kevin J. Anderson.

  “Crossing into the Empire” first appeared in David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination, December 1996, edited by David Copperfield and Janet Berliner.

  “The Second Shield” first appeared in Playboy, December 1995.

  “Hot Times in Magma City” first appeared in Omni On-Line, May 1995. However, the version reproduced here is that which appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1995.

  Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, by Agberg, Ltd.

  Introductory matter copyright © 2013 by Agberg, Ltd.

  Illustrations are reproduced from source text of first publication or as from indicated above.

  For

  Byron Preiss

  Martin H. Greenberg

  Lou Aronica

  Gregory Benford

  Gardner Dozois

  Greg Bear

  Kevin Anderson

  Janet Berliner

  Ellen Datlow

  Keith Ferrell

  And—of course—Alice K. Turner

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  In the Clone Zone

  Hunters in the Forest

  A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple

  Thebes of the Hundred Gates

  It Comes and Goes

  Looking for the Fountain

  The Way to Spook City

  The Red Blaze is the Morning

  Death Do Us Part

  The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James

  Crossing into the Empire

  The Second Shield

  Hot Times in Magma City

  INTRODUCTION

  The stories in this volume were written between July of 1990 and March of 1995—the second half of the fifth decade of my career as a science-fiction writer. I don’t think I could have imagined, when I began that career in the early 1950’s, that science-fiction publishing would evolve the way it did over the next forty years.

  Science fiction was small-time stuff, back there in the first years of President Eisenhower’s era. There were forty or fifty writers, maybe, who strived to amuse an audience (largely made up of boys and young men) that could not have amounted to as many as a hundred thousand people. The bulk of the science fiction that was published in those days appeared in magazine form: fifteen or twenty existed at any one time, usually, most of them little scruffy things, printed on cheap paper, with names like Marvel Science Fiction, Dynamic Science Fiction, Planet Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories. They had garish covers and paid the writers next to nothing, but you could live pretty well on next to nothing then, if you raked in those next-to-nothing checks often enough. It was an era of deft and prolific writers—Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Philip José Farmer, and many more, including, by 1954, the very young Robert Silverberg.

  We all read every magazine and kept up to date on all of our colleagues’ work; we knew the editors and their quirks; we all knew each other, too, since most of us were clustered either in the New York area or in and around Los Angeles. Professional science-fictiondom back then was like a small town. (With a small town’s proclivity for soap-opera sexuality, too: most of our marriages were tenuous things and the rate of marital breakup and rearrangement was quite extraordinary. X, after divorcing his wife Y so that she could marry Z, would marry B’s former wife Q, who also had been formerly married to P, who now was married to C’s ex-wife J, and so on and so on around the circle in dizzying fashion. I was just a little too young, then, to have become involved in all that, though I had my own entanglements a couple of decades later.)

  Life would have been considerably less hectic if we could have written just one novel or maybe two a year instead of having to churn out ten or twenty short stories, but there was no real market for science fiction in book form in the early 1950’s. A couple of hardcover publishers and one or two paperback houses did have something like regular science-fiction programs—a book or two a month—but they concentrated mainly on reprints of work that had previously appeared in the magazines, all of it by the best-known authors—such titles as Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. For most of us, proposing a new novel to a publisher and walking away with a nice contract simply wasn’t possible.

  Nor did Hollywood have much to offer. Nowadays we see a new hundred-million-dollar-budget science-fiction epic opening every few weeks, but the s-f movies of the 50’s were few and far between—Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, This Island Earth—and no vast sums were lavished on them by their makers. Television offered the creaky kiddie show Captain Video and not much else.

  How different it all is today, as television bristles with a dozen different s-f shows a week, crowds swarm the movie theaters to see the latest futuristic special-effects extravaganza, and hundreds and even thousands of science-fiction and fantasy novels pour from the presses every year (the most successful of them linked to television or movie sources.) Books and movies and television have become the essence of the thing; the old-fashioned science-fiction magazine is all but extinct and short story-writing is a marginal activity pursued mainly by beginners, part-time professionals, and sentimental oldsters like me. It’s not something that one does for the money, because there’s not really any money in it. The rates per word that the s-f magazines pay for their material have actually declined sharply over the last forty years, after adjustment for inflation. (In some cases, magazines were paying the same word rates in absolute dollars in the nineties that we were getting back in the fifties, though the purchasing power of the dollar had declined by something like ninety percent!) And although by 1990 magazines like Playboy and Omni were paying ten and even twenty times as much for short stories as the highest-paying magazines of 1955 were able to offer, they were buying no more than one or two stories a month, hardly enough to kee
p a population of hungry free-lancers in bagels, and not even Playboy’s lofty fees were really that much superior to those of the old days, after adjustment for inflation.

  But, as I’ve said in other volumes in this series, money is not the only or even the primary reason why people write science fiction, and I have kept on writing short stories all these years, if only to keep my hand in, a story or two a year, more than that if someone comes to me with a tempting project, some anthology with an interesting theme, perhaps. Some writers—me, for example—are prone to have quite a few story ideas a year, but writing quite a few novels a year is hardly a feasible proposition. (And some good story ideas simply aren’t suitable for development to novel length, anyway, though they make lovely short stories.)

  Here, then, is the cream of the Silverberg output, 1990-95. I suppose I wrote more short stories in the first six months of 1957 than in that entire six-year period; but so be it. It’s a different world today. I look back nostalgically on the small-town atmosphere of the era in which I began my career, and there are times when I’d be glad to “call back yesterday, bid time return.” As Shakespeare pointed out, though, that can’t be done. The one recourse is the one I have chosen, which is to soldier staunchly onward through the years, come what may, writing a story or two here and a book there, while the world changes out of all recognition around me. And so—to leap neatly from the Bard of Avon to F. Scott Fitzgerald—“so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

  —Robert Silverberg

  IN THE CLONE ZONE

  In the years when I was writing the stories that are collected here, I routinely sent one every summer to Alice Turner of Playboy, and generally she bought it, although most of the time we went through an elaborate duel over the length and structure of the story before one or the other of us gave up. Since a story I had tried on her in May, 1990 had wound up at Amazing Stories instead, I felt obliged to come up with something else for Alice that year. So, a month or so after that one, I spent some time pondering various dramatic (and melo-dramatic) aspects of cloning human beings, and came up with this sinister little item, seven years ahead of the headlines about the cloned sheep Dolly. Alice thought it needed a little trimming, of course. (She almost always did.) But she bought it and ran it in the March, 1991 Playboy. Every now and then I get a movie nibble on it; and the nibbles will come harder and faster now, I suspect, with the controversy over cloning rapidly moving out of science fiction and into the real-world political arena.

  ——————

  The airport was very new. It had a bright, shiny, major-world-capital feel, and for a moment, Mondschein thought the plane had landed in Rio or Buenos Aires by mistake. But then he noticed the subtle signs of deception, the tackiness around the edges, the spongy junk behind the gleaming façades, and knew that he must indeed be in Tierra Alvarado.

  “Señor Mondschein?” a deep male voice said while he was still marching down the corridors that led to the immigration lounge. He turned and saw a short, wide-shouldered man in a beribboned green-and-red comic-opera uniform that, he remembered after a moment, was that of the Guardia de la Patria, the Maximum Leader’s elite security corps. “I am Colonel Aristegui,” he said. “You may come with me, please. It was a good journey? You are not overly fatigued?”

  Aristegui didn’t bother with passport formalities. He led Mondschein through a steel doorway marked SEGURIDAD, INGRESO PROHIBIDO that admitted them to a series of bewildering passageways and catwalks and spiral staircases. There was no veneer back here: Everything was severely functional—gun-metal-gray walls, exposed rivets and struts, harsh unshielded light fixtures that looked a century old. Here it comes, Mondschein thought: This man will take me to some deserted corner of the airstrip and touch his laser pistol to my temple and they will bury me in an unmarked grave, and that will be that, five minutes back in the country and I am out of the way forever.

  The final visa approval had come through only the day before, the fifth of June, and just hours later, Mondschein had boarded the Aero Alvarado flight that would take him in a single soaring supersonic arc nonstop from Zurich to his long-lost homeland on the west coast of South America. Mondschein hadn’t set foot there in 25 years, not since the Maximum Leader had expelled him for life as a sort of upside-down reward for his extraordinary technological achievements: For it was Mondschein, at the turn of the century, who had turned his impoverished little country into the world leader in human cloning.

  In those days, it was called the Republic of the Central Andes. The Maximum Leader had put it together out of parts of the shattered nations that in an earlier time had been known as Peru, Chile and Bolivia. But now the name of the country was Tierra Alvarado and its airline was Aero Alvarado and its capital was Ciudad Alvarado. This was a fine old South American tradition. You expected a Maximum Leader to clap his name on everything, to hang his portrait everywhere, to glorify himself in every imaginable way.

  Alvarado had carried things a little further than most, though, by having two dozen living replicas of himself created, the better to serve his people. That had been Mondschein’s final task as a citizen of the republic, the supreme accomplishment of his art: to produce two dozen AAA Class clones of the Maximum Leader, which could function as doubles for Alvarado at the dreary meetings of the Popular Assembly, stand in for him at the interminable National Day of Liberation parades, and keep would-be assassins in a constant state of befuddlement. They were masterpieces, those two dozen Alvarados—all but indistinguishable from the original, the only AAA Class clones ever made. With their aid the Maximum Leader was able to maintain unblinking vigilance over the citizens of Tierra Alvarado 24 hours a day.

  But Mondschein didn’t care how many Alvarados he might be coming home to. Twenty, 50, 100, what did that matter? Alvarado still held the entire country in his pocket, as he had for the past generation. That was the essential situation. To Mondschein, the clones made no real difference at all.

  In fact, there was very little that did make a difference to Mondschein. He was getting old and slept badly most of the time. He wanted to speak his native language again—Spanish as it had been spoken in Peru and not the furry Spanish of Spain—and he wanted to breathe the sharp air of the high mountains and eat papas a la huancaina and anticuchos and a proper ceviche and maybe see the ancient walls of Cuzco once more and the clear dark water of Lake Titicaca. It didn’t seem likely to him that Alvarado had granted him a pardon after all this time simply for the sake of luring him back to face a firing squad. The safe conduct, which Mondschein hadn’t in any way solicited but had been overjoyed to receive, was probably sincere: a sign that the old tyrant had mellowed at last. And if not, well, at least he would die on his native soil, which somehow seemed better than dying in Bern, Toulon, Madrid, Stockholm, Prague, wherever—any of the innumerable cities in which he had lived during his long years of exile.

  They emerged from the building into a bleak, deserted rear yard, where empty baggage carts were strewn around like the fossil carcasses of ancient beasts, a perfect place for a quiet execution. The dry cool wind of early winter was sweeping a dark line of dust across the bare pavement. But to Mondschein’s astonishment, an immense sleek black limousine materialized from somewhere almost at once and two more Guardia men hopped out, saluting madly. Aristegui beckoned him into the rear of the vast car. “Your villa has been prepared for you, Dr. Mondschein. You are the guest of the nation. When you are refreshed, the Minister of Scientific Development requests your attendance at the Palace of Government, perhaps this afternoon.” He flicked a finger and a mahogany panel swung open, revealing a well-stocked bar. “You will have a cognac? It is the rare old. Or champagne, perhaps? A whiskey? Everything imported, the best quality.”

  “I don’t drink,” said Mondschein.

  “Ah,” said Aristegui uncertainly, as though that were a fact that should have been on his prep sheet and unaccountably hadn’t been. Or perhaps he had simply been lo
oking forward to nipping into the rare old himself, which now would be inappropriate. “Well, then. You are comfortable? Not too warm, not too cool?” Mondschein nodded and peered out the window. They were on an imposing-looking highway now, with a city of pastel-hued high-rise buildings visible off to the side. He didn’t recognize a thing. Alvarado had built this city from scratch in the empty highland plains midway between the coast and the lake and it had been only a few years old when Mondschein had last seen it, a place of raw gouged hillsides and open culverts and half-paved avenues with stacks of girders and sewer pipes and cable reels piled up everywhere. From a distance, at least, it looked quite splendid now. But as they left the beautifully landscaped road that had carried them from the airport to the city and turned off into the urban residential district, he saw that the splendor was, unsurprisingly, a fraud: The avenues had been paved, all right, but they were reverting to nature, cracking and upheaving as the swelling roots of the bombacho trees and the candelero palms that had been planted down the central dividers ripped them apart. The grand houses of pink and green and azure stucco were weather-stained and crumbling, and Mondschein observed ugly random outcroppings of tin-roofed squatter shacks sprouting like mushrooms in the open fields behind them, where elegant gardens briefly had been. He thought of his comfortable little apartment in Bern and felt a pang.

  But then the car swung off onto a different road, into the hills to the east, which even in the city’s earliest days had been the magnificently appointed enclave of the privileged and powerful. Here there was no sign of decay. The gardens were impeccable, the villas spacious and well kept. Mondschein remembered this district well. He had lived in it himself before Alvarado had found it expedient to give him a one-way ticket abroad. Names he hadn’t thought of in decades came to the surface of his mind: This was the Avenida de las Flores, this was Calle del Sol, this was Camino de los Toros, this was Calle de los Indios, and this—this—