Far Horizons: All New Tales From the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction Read online

  FAR HORIZONS

  GREATEST WORLDS OF SF

  EDITED BY

  ROBERT

  SILVERBERG

  For Robert A. Heinlein

  Isaac Asimov

  John W. Campbell, Jr.

  —They showed the way

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Robert Silverberg

  THE EKUMEN:

  Old Music and the Slave Women

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  THE FOREVER WAR:

  A Separate War

  Joe Haldeman

  THE ENDER SERIES:

  Investment Counselor

  Orson Scott Card

  THE UPLIFT UNIVERSE:

  Temptation

  David Brin

  ROMA ETERNA:

  Getting to Know the Dragon

  Robert Silverberg

  THE HYPERION CANTOS:

  Orphans of the Helix

  Dan Simmons

  THE SLEEPLESS:

  Sleeping Dogs

  Nancy Kress

  TALES OF THE HEECHEE:

  The Boy Who Would Live Forever

  Frederik Pohl

  THE GALACTIC CENTER SERIES:

  A Hunger for the Infinite

  Gregory Benford

  THE SHIP WHO SANG:

  The Ship Who Returned

  Anne McCaffrey

  THE WAY:

  The Way of All Ghosts

  Greg Bear

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND EDITOR

  PRAISE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  The best science-fiction ideas are very big ones that have never quite occurred to anyone before, and the writers to whom such ideas come very frequently have second thoughts about them, or third thoughts, or fourth and fifth ones. And so one of the glories of modern-day science fiction has been the extended series in which the writer digs deeper and ever deeper into his original concept, finding new richness with each excavation.

  I’m not speaking here of the kind of series that James Blish, long ago, called a “template” series—in which the writer, having hit on a serviceable idea and an appropriate structure for dramatizing it, goes on profitably replicating idea and format over and over again, sometimes for dozens of stories. This is not necessarily reprehensible—the Sherlock Holmes series, for example, is a template series that has given great pleasure to readers for more than a century, and the fundamental similarity of one story to the next and the unchanging relationship of Holmes to Watson are essential components of the delight to be had. But in the Holmes stories we do not find increasing depth of insight into the problems of crime detection in Victorian England, or into the curious personality of Sherlock Holmes, as the series proceeds. The series extends by self-imitation, not by evolution, as so many slick-magazine series of a later era (Tugboat Annie, Alexander Botts, etc.) did, and the way most television programs do nowadays. Most of the series stories that the Saturday Evening Post ran so copiously fifty and sixty years ago are forgotten today, as are the television shows of the season before last; it is Conan Doyle’s superior ingenuity that keeps the Holmes stories alive despite their underlying formulaic nature.

  We have had plenty of formula-series stuff in science fiction, too, from Tom Swift back in 1910 through Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter on Mars novels of the 1920s through the Captain Future epics of a couple of decades later, and on through the kind of highly commercial multi-volume stuff that floods the bookstores today. Some of this is fun, in its way, although a great deal is mere space-filling junk, in which a trivial idea is inflated by means of much huffing and puffing into three (or more) fat volumes that keep the readers contentedly circling around and around the same feeble little concept for hundreds of thousands of words. (We also have the myriad Star Trek and Star Wars novelizations, many of which tell lively and entertaining stories, but which, by predesign and stern publishing decree, do nothing at all to advance the underlying series concept beyond its starting point.)

  However, we do have the other sort of series in science fiction, too, the kind that carries the reader through an evolutionary progression of concept and (sometimes) insight into character, and it is out of that kind of series that this book has been constructed.

  Anyone with any historical grounding in science fiction can name dozens of such series at the first prod of his memory. E.E. Smith, Ph.D., a pioneer of the form, operated two of them, the Skylark novels of the 1920s and 1930s, and the subsequent Lensman series, vast and ever-expanding epics of the spaceways. In the 1940s and 1950s Robert A. Heinlein linked dozens of stories and novels into one enormous and basically coherent Future History; Poul Anderson offered a similar structure of his own a couple of decades later; A.E. van Vogt wrote two dazzling and bewildering novels about Gilbert Gosseyn and his fellow semanticians of the Null-A crowd. (A third, much less dazzling, followed decades later.) Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the original trilogy and the various later books, looked deep into the Asimovian concept of “psychohistory,” and, as the series grew, Asimov eventually linked it with his other celebrated many-paneled work, the Positronic Robot series. Henry Kuttner’s memorable “Baldy” stories, collected as Mutant, were admirable examples of the same thing in shorter form, as of course were Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. The list could continue for many pages, invoking the names of Blish, Simak, Clarke, Herbert, Leiber, Cordwainer Smith, and many another hero of time and space.

  Amidst all the content-free trilogies and infinitely expanding media tie-in series of the present era, plenty of splendid books are still being written that form ongoing science-fiction series which actually evolve and penetrate ever more deeply into their conceptual frameworks. What I have done in Far Horizons is to gather together most of today’s foremost practitioners of the evolutionary science-fiction series and ask them to write a short story or novelette that explores some aspect of their famous series that they did not find a way of dealing with in the books themselves.

  You will find some well-known writers missing. I would gladly have included a new Foundation story here, or a new snippet of the Heinlein Future History series, or a return visit to Frank Herbert’s Arrakis. Not possible, alas, in this particular continuum. And a couple of the living writers whom I invited told me that they had already said all they wanted to say about subject X or Y and Z, a position I had to applaud, however much I regretted their refusals.

  But those who are on hand form as impressive a group of late-twentieth-century science-fiction writers as could possibly be assembled. I’m grateful to them all for having been willing to examine once again the settings and characters and ideas that have given so many readers such great pleasure over the past couple of decades. A great science-fiction concept, as we have learned over and over again in the world of science fiction, is inexhaustible—the infinite always is—and herewith a platoon of our best writers demonstrates that all over again for your enjoyment.

  —Robert Silverberg

  May, 1998

  THE EKUMEN

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Rocannon’s World (1966)

  Planet of Exile (1966)

  City of Illusions (1967)

  The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

  The Dispossessed (1974)

  The Word for World is Forest (1976)

  Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

  Most of my science fiction takes place within one future-historical frame. As this developed haphazardly along with the books and stories, it contains some spectacular inconsis
tencies, but the general plan is this: The people of a world called Hain colonized the entire Orion Arm of the galaxy over a million years ago. All hominid species so far encountered are descendants of Hainish colonists (often genetically tailored to fit the colony planet or for other reasons).

  After this Expansion, the Hainish withdrew to Hain for hundreds of millennia, leaving their far-flung offspring to hack it.

  When Earth people began to explore nearby space, using Nearly As Fast As Light (NAFAL) ships and the instantaneous communicator called the ansible, they met up with the Hainish, now reaching out again to find their lost kinfolk. A League of Worlds was formed (see the novels Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions). This expanded and matured into an egalitarian association of worlds and people called the Ekumen, administered from Hain by people called Stabiles, while Mobiles went out to explore unknown worlds, find out about new peoples, and serve as envoys and ambassadors to member worlds.

  The “Ekumenical” novels are: The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, and The Dispossessed. Most of the science-fiction stories in the collections The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose, the last three stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, and all in Four Ways to Forgiveness, are set in the Ekumen.

  This last book introduced the planets Werel and Yeowe. On Werel, thirty-five hundred years ago, an aggressive black-skinned people dominated the paler northern races and instituted a slave-based society and economy, with caste established by skin color. First contact by the Ekumen scared the xenophobic Werelians into rapid development of weapons and spaceships, and incidentally into colonizing Yeowe, the planet next inward to their sun, which they exploited with intensive slave labor. Soon after Werel finally admitted diplomats from the Ekumen, a great slave uprising began on Yeowe. After thirty years of war, Yeowe won its freedom from the dominant nation on Werel, Voe Deo. Voe Dean society was destabilized by the Yeowan liberation, as well as by the new perspectives offered by the Ekumen. Within a few years, a widespread slave uprising in Voe Deo pitted “owners” against “assets” in a full-scale civil war. This story takes place late in that war.

  —Ursula K. Le Guin

  OLD MUSIC AND

  THE SLAVE WOMEN

  by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The chief intelligence officer of the Ekumenical Embassy to Werel, a man who on his home world had the name Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdan, and who in Voe Deo was known by a nickname, Esdardon Aya or Old Music, was bored. It had taken a civil war and three years to bore him, but he had got to the point where he referred to himself in ansible reports to the Stabiles on Hain as the Embassy’s chief stupidity officer.

  He had been able, however, to retain a few clandestine links with friends in the Free City even after the Legitimate Government sealed the Embassy, allowing no one and no information to enter or leave it. In the third summer of the war, he came to the Ambassador with a request. Cut off from reliable communication with the Embassy, Liberation Command had asked him (how? asked the Ambassador; through one of the men who delivered groceries, he explained) if the Embassy would let one or two of its people slip across the lines and talk with them, be seen with them, offer proof that despite propaganda and disinformation, and though the Embassy was stuck in Jit City, its staff had not been co-opted into supporting the Legitimates, but remained neutral and ready to deal with rightful authority on either side.

  “Jit City?” said the Ambassador. “Never mind. But how do you get there?”

  “Always the problem with Utopia,” Esdan said. “Well, I can pass with contact lenses, if nobody’s looking closely. Crossing the Divide is the tricky bit.”

  Most of the great city was still physically there, the government buildings, factories and warehouses, the university, the tourist attractions: the Great Shrine of Tual, Theater Street, the Old Market with its interesting display rooms and lofty Hall of Auction, disused since the sale and rental of assets had been shifted to the electronic marketplace; the numberless streets, avenues, and boulevards, the dusty parks shaded by purple-flowered beya trees, the miles and miles of shops, sheds, mills, tracks, stations, apartment buildings, houses, compounds, the neighborhoods, the suburbs, and exurbs. Most of it still stood, most of its fifteen million people were still there, but its deep complexity was gone. Connections were broken. Interactions did not take place. A brain after a stroke.

  The greatest break was a brutal one, an ax-blow right through the pons, a kilo-wide no-man’s-land of blown-up buildings and blocked streets, wreckage and rubble. East of the Divide was Legitimate territory: downtown, government offices, embassies, banks, communications towers, the university, the great parks and wealthy neighborhoods, the roads out to the armory, barracks, airports, and spaceport. West of the Divide was Free City, Dusty-ville, Liberation territory: factories, union compounds, the rentspeople’s quarters, the old gareot residential neighborhoods, endless miles of little streets petering out into the plains at last. Through both ran the great East-West highways, empty.

  The Liberation people smuggled him out of the Embassy and almost across the Divide successfully. He and they had had a lot of practice in the old days getting runaway assets out to Yeowe and freedom. He found it interesting to be the one smuggled instead of one of the smugglers, finding it far more frightening yet less stressful, since he was not responsible, the package not the postman. But somewhere in the connection there had been a bad link.

  They made it on foot into the Divide and partway through it and stopped at a little derelict truck sitting on its wheel rims under a gutted apartment house. A driver sat at the wheel behind the cracked, crazed windshield, and grinned at him. His guide gestured him into the back. The truck took off like a hunting cat, following a crazy route, zigzagging through the ruins. They were nearly across the Divide, jolting across a rubbled stretch which might have been a street or a marketplace, when the truck veered, stopped, there were shouts, shots, the van back was flung open and men plunged in at him. “Easy,” he said, “go easy,” for they were manhandling him, hauling him, twisting his arm behind his back. They yanked him out of the truck, pulled off his coat and slapped him down searching for weapons, frog-marched him to a car waiting beside the truck. He tried to see if his driver was dead but could not look around before they shoved him into the car.

  It was an old government state-coach, dark red, wide, and long, made for parades, for carrying great estate owners to the Council and ambassadors from the spaceport. Its main section could be curtained to separate men from women passengers, and the driver’s compartment was sealed off so the passengers wouldn’t be breathing in what a slave breathed out.

  One of the men had kept his arm twisted up his back until he shoved him headfirst into the car, and all he thought as he found himself sitting between two men and facing three others and the car starting up was, I’m getting too old for this.

  He held still, letting his fear and pain subside, not ready yet to move even to rub his sharply hurting shoulder, not looking into faces nor too obviously at the streets. Two glances told him they were passing Rei Street, going east, out of the city. He realised then he had been hoping they were taking him back to the Embassy. What a fool.

  They had the streets to themselves, except for the startled gaze of people on foot as they flashed by. Now they were on a wide boulevard, going very fast, still going east. Although he was in a very bad situation, he still found it absolutely exhilarating just to be out of the Embassy, out in the air, in the world, and moving, going fast.

  Cautiously he raised his hand and massaged his shoulder. As cautiously, he glanced at the men beside him and facing him. All were dark-skinned, two blue-black. Two of the men facing him were young. Fresh, stolid faces. The third was a veot of the third rank, an oga. His face had the quiet inexpressiveness in which his caste was trained. Looking at him, Esdan caught his eye. Each looked away instantly.

  Esdan liked veots. He saw them, soldiers as well as slaveholders, as part of the old Voe Deo,
members of a doomed species. Businessmen and bureaucrats would survive and thrive in the Liberation and no doubt find soldiers to fight for them, but the military caste would not. Their code of loyalty, honor, and austerity was too like that of their slaves, with whom they shared the worship of Kamye, the Swordsman, the Bondsman. How long would that mysticism of suffering survive the Liberation? Veots were intransigent vestiges of an intolerable order. He trusted them, and had seldom been disappointed in his trust.

  The oga was very black, very handsome, like Teyeo, a veot Esdan had particularly liked. He had left Werel long before the war, off to Terra and Hain with his wife, who would be a Mobile of the Ekumen one of these days. In a few centuries. Long after the war was over, long after Esdan was dead. Unless he chose to follow them, went back, went home.

  Idle thoughts. During a revolution you don’t choose. You’re carried, a bubble in a cataract, a spark in a bonfire, an unarmed man in a car with seven armed men driving very fast down the broad, blank East Arterial Highway.…They were leaving the city. Heading for the East Provinces. The Legitimate Government of Voe Deo was now reduced to half the capital city and two provinces, in which seven out of eight people were what the eighth person, their owner, called assets.

  The two men up in the front compartment were talking, though they couldn’t be heard in the owner compartment. Now the bullet-headed man to Esdan’s right asked a muttered question to the oga facing him, who nodded.

  “Oga,” Esdan said.

  The veot’s expressionless eyes met his.

  “I need to piss.”

  The man said nothing and looked away. None of them said anything for a while. They were on a bad stretch of the highway, torn up by fighting during the first summer of the Uprising or merely not maintained since. The jolts and shocks were hard on Esdan’s bladder.