Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  1. The John F. Kennedy, which goes to Scylla/Charybdis next month, is like a little L-5 with bombs up its tail (see pix upleft, upright).

  A.The trip’s twenty months. They could either take a few people and fill the thing up with food, air, and water—or take a lot of people inside a closed ecology, like L-5.

  B.They could’ve gotten by with only a couple hundred people, to run the farms and stuff. But almost all the space freeks wanted to go. They’re used to living that way, anyhow (and they never get to go anyplace).

  C.When they get back, the farms will be used as a starter for L-4, like L-5 but smaller at first, and on the other side of the Moon (pic downleft).

  2. For other Tricentennial fax & pix, see bacover.

  July 2076

  Charlie was just finishing up a week on Earth the day the John F. Kennedy was launched. Tired of being interviewed, he slipped away from the media lounge at the Cape shuttleport. His white clearance card got him out onto the landing strip, alone.

  The midnight shuttle was being fuelled at the far end of the strip, gleaming pink-white in the last light from the setting sun. Its image twisted and danced in the shimmering heat that radiated from the tarmac. The smell of the soft tar was indelibly associated in his mind with leave-taking, relief.

  He walked to the middle of the strip and checked his watch. Five minutes. He lit a cigarette and threw it away. He rechecked his mental calculations; the flight would start low in the southwest. He blocked out the sun with a raised hand. What would 150 bombs per second look like? For the media, they were called fuel capsules. The people who had carefully assembled them and gently lifted them to orbit and installed them in the tanks, they called them bombs. Ten times the brightness of a full moon, they had said. On L-5, you weren’t supposed to look toward it without a dark filter.

  No warm-up; it suddenly appeared, an impossibly brilliant rainbow speck just over the horizon. It gleamed for several minutes, then dimmed slightly with the haze and slipped away.

  Most of the United States wouldn’t see it until it came around again, some two hours later, turning night into day, competing with local pyrotechnic displays. Then every couple of hours after that. Charlie would see it once more, then get on the shuttle. And finally stop having to call it by the name of a dead politician.

  September 2076

  There was a quiet celebration on L-5 when Daedalus reached the mid-point of its journey, flipped, and started decelerating. The progress report from its crew characterized the journey as “uneventful.” At that time, they were going nearly two tenths of the speed of light. The laser beam that carried communications was red-shifted from blue light down to orange; the message that turnaround had been successful took two weeks to travel from Daedalus to L-5.

  They announced a slight course change. They had analyzed the polarization of light from Scylla/Charybdis as their phase angle increased, and were pretty sure the system was surrounded by flat rings of debris, like Saturn. They would “come in low” to avoid collision.

  January 2077

  Daedalus had been sending back recognizable pictures of the Scylla/Charybdis system for three weeks. They finally had one that was dramatic enough for groundhog consumption.

  Charlie set the holo cube on his desk and pushed it around with his finger, marvelling.

  “This is incredible. How did they do it?”

  “It’s a montage, of course.” Johnny had been one of the youngest adults left behind: heart murmur, trick knees, a surfeit of astrophysicists.

  “The two stars are a strobe snapshot in infrared. Sort of. Some ten or twenty thousand exposures taken as the ship orbited around the system, then sorted out and enhanced.” He pointed, but it wasn’t much help, since Charlie was looking at the cube from a different angle.

  “The lamina of fire where the atmospheres touch, that was taken in ultraviolet. Shows more fine structure that way.

  “The rings were easy. Fairly long exposures in visible light. Gives the star background, too.”

  A light tap on the door and an assistant stuck his head in. “Have a second, Doctor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Somebody from a Russian May Day committee is on the phone. She wants to know whether they’ve changed the name of the ship to Brezhnev yet.”

  “Yeah. Tell her we decided on ‘Leon Trotsky’ instead, though.”

  He nodded seriously. “Okay.” He started to close the door.

  “Wait!” Charlie rubbed his eyes. “Tell her, uh . . . the ship doesn’t have a commemorative name while it’s in orbit there. They’ll rechristen it just before the start of the return trip.”

  “Is that true?” Johnny asked.

  “I don’t know. Who cares? In another couple of months, they won’t want it named after anybody.” He and Ab had worked out a plan—admittedly rather shaky—to protect L-5 from the groundhogs’ wrath; nobody on the satellite knew ahead of time that the ship was headed for 61 Cygni. It was a decision the crew arrived at on the way to Scylla/Charybdis; they modified the drive system to accept matter-antimatter destruction while they were orbiting the double star. L-5 would first hear of the mutinous plan via a transmission sent as Daedalus left Scylla/Charybdis. They’d be a month on their way by the time the message got to Earth

  It was pretty transparent, but at least they had been careful that no record of Daedalus’s true mission be left on L-5. Three thousand people did know the truth, though, and any competent engineer or physical scientist would suspect it.

  Ab had felt that, although there was a better-than-even chance they would be exposed, surely the groundhogs couldn’t stay angry for twenty-three years—even if they were unimpressed by the antimatter and other wonders . . .

  Besides, Charlie thought, it’s not their worry anymore.

  As it turned out, the crew of Daedalus would have bigger things to worry about.

  June 2077

  The Russians had their May Day celebration—Charlie watched it on TV and winced every time they mentioned the good ship Leonid I. Brezhnev—and then things settled back down to normal. Charlie and three thousand others waited nervously for the “surprise” message. It came in early June, as expected, scrambled in a data channel. But it didn’t say what it was supposed to:

  This is Abigail Bemis, to Charles Leventhal.

  Charlie, we have real trouble. The ship has been damaged, hit in the stern by a good chunk of something. It punched right through the main drive reflector. Destroyed a set of control sensors and one attitude jet.

  As far as we can tell, the situation is stable. We’re maintaining acceleration at just a tiny fraction under one gee. But we can’t steer, and we can’t shut off the main drive.

  We didn’t have any trouble with ring debris when we were orbiting, since we were inside Roche’s limit. Coming in, as you know, we’d managed to take advantage of natural divisions in the rings. We tried the same going back, but it was a slower, more complicated process, since we mass so goddamn much now. We must have picked up a piece from the fringe of one of the outer rings.

  If we could turn off the drive, we might have a chance at fixing it. But the work pods can’t keep up with the ship, not at one gee. The radiation down there would fry the operator in seconds, anyway.

  We’re working on it. If you have any ideas, let us know. It occurs to me that this puts you in the clear—we were headed back to Earth, but got clobbered. Will send a transmission to that effect on the regular comm channel. This message is strictly burn-before-reading.

  Endit.

  It worked perfectly, as far as getting Charlie and L-5 off the hook—and the drama of the situation precipitated a level of interest in space travel unheard-of since the 1960s.

  They even had a hero. A volunteer had gone down in a heavily shielded work pod, lowered on a cable, to take a look at the situation. She’d sent back clear pictures of the damage, before the cable snapped.

  Daedalus: AD 2081 | Earth: AD 2101

  The following news item wa
s killed from Fax & Pix, because it was too hard to translate into the “plain English” that made the paper so popular:

  SPACESHIP PASSES 61 CYGNI—SORT OF

  (L-5 Stringer)

  A message received today from the spaceship Daedalus said that it had just passed within 400 astronomical units of 61 Cygni. That’s about ten times as far as the planet Pluto is from the Sun.

  Actually, the spaceship passed the star some eleven years ago. It’s taken all that time for the message to get back to us.

  We don’t know for sure where the spaceship actually is, now. If they still haven’t repaired the runaway drive, they’re about eleven light-years past the 61 Cygni system (their speed when they passed the double star was better than ninety-nine percent the speed of light).

  The situation is more complicated if you look at it from the point of view of a passenger on the spaceship. Because of relativity, time seems to pass more slowly as you approach the speed of light. So only about four years passed for them on the eleven-light-year journey.

  L-5 Coordinator Charles Leventhal points out that the spaceship has enough antimatter fuel to keep accelerating to the edge of the Galaxy. The crew then would be only some twenty years older—but it would be 20,000 years before we heard from them . . .

  (Kill this one. There’s more stuff about what the ship looked like to the people on 61 Cygni, and howcum we could talk to them all the time even though time was slower there, but it’s all as stupid as this.)

  Daedalus: AD 2083 | Earth: AD 2144

  Charlie Leventhal died at the age of ninety-nine, bitter. Almost a decade earlier, it had been revealed that they’d planned all along for Daedalus to be a starship. Few people had paid much attention to the news. Among those who did, the consensus was that anything that got rid of a thousand scientists at once was a good thing. Look at the mess they got us in.

  Daedalus: sixty-seven light-years out, and still accelerating.

  * * *

  Daedalus: AD 2085 | Earth: AD 3578

  After over seven years of shipboard research and development—and some 1,500 light-years of travel—they managed to shut down the engine. With sophisticated telemetry, the job was done without endangering another life.

  Every life was precious now. They were no longer simply explorers; almost half their fuel was gone. They were colonists, with no ticket back.

  The message of their success would reach Earth in fifteen centuries. Whether there would be an infrared telescope around to detect it, that was a matter of some conjecture.

  * * *

  Daedalus: AD 2093 | Earth: ca. AD 5000

  While decelerating, they had investigated several systems in their line of flight. They found one with an Earth-type planet around a Sun-type sun, and aimed for it.

  The season they began landing colonists, the dominant feature in the planet’s night sky was a beautiful blooming cloud of gas that astronomers had named the North American Nebula.

  Which was an irony that didn’t occur to any of these colonists from L-5—give or take a few years, it was America’s Trimillenial.

  America itself was a little the worse for wear, this 3,000th anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with a crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sandstorms.

  No fireworks were planned, for lack of an audience, for lack of planners; bacteria just don’t care. May Day, too, would be ignored.

  The only humans in the Solar System lived in a glass-and-metal tube. They tended their automatic machinery, and turned their backs on the dead Earth, and worshipped the constellation Cygnus, and had forgotten why.

  About the Authors

  EDWARD WILLETT is the award-winning author of more than sixty books of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction for readers of all ages. His most recent titles include the Worldshapers series for DAW Books and the five-book young-adult fantasy series The Shards of Excalibur, just re-released by Shadowpaw Press. Ed won Canada’s Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English in 2009 for Marseguro (DAW Books) and the Aurora Award for Best Fan Related Work in 2019 for his podcast The Worldshapers; he’s been shortlisted for Auroras multiple times. He’s currently working on The Tangled Stars, a new space opera for DAW. He lives in Regina, Saskatchewan. Find him on Twitter @ewillett, on Facebook @edward.willett, and at edwardwillett.com.

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  TANYA HUFF lives in rural Ontario with her wife, Fiona Patton, six cats, two dogs, and an increasing number of fish. Her thirty-two novels and seventy-nine short stories include horror, heroic fantasy, urban fantasy, comedy, and military SF. Her Blood series was turned into the twenty-two-episode Blood Ties, and writing episode nine allowed her to finally use her degree in Radio & Television Arts. Many of her short stories are available as eCollections. She’s on twitter at @TanyaHuff and Facebook as Tanya Huff. Since she hasn’t done anything about it, she probably still has a LiveJournal account . . .

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  JOHN SCALZI lives in Ohio and metabolizes through the use of oxygen and some other compounds and components.

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  JOHN C. WRIGHT is a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, who was only once on the lam and forced to hide from the police. He is the author of some twenty-two novels, including the critically acclaimed The Golden Age and Count to a Trillion. He has published anthologies, including Awake in the Night Land and City Beyond Time, as well as nonfiction. His novel Somewhither won the Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2016. He holds the record for the most Hugo Award nominations for a single year. He presently works as a writer in Virginia, where he lives in fairytale-like happiness with his wife, the authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their four children.

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  L.E. MODESITT, JR. is the author of more than seventy-five science fiction and fantasy novels, nearly fifty short stories, and technical and economic articles. His novels include four fantasy series, including the Saga of Recluce and the Imager Portfolio. His first story was published in Analog in 1973. His most recent book is Quantum Shadows, and his next book is Fairhaven Rising (Tor, February 2021). He has been a U.S. Navy pilot; a market research analyst; a real estate agent; director of political research; legislative and staff director for U.S. Congressmen; Director of Legislation/Congressional Relations for the U.S. EPA; and a consultant on environmental, regulatory, and communications issues.

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  Since 1997, award-winning Canadian author/former biologist JULIE E. CZERNEDA has shared her curiosity about living things through her SF and fantasy novels, published by DAW Books. Her latest fantasy is the standalone The Gossamer Mage (2019). Currently, Julie’s returned to her beloved character, Esen, in her Web Shifter’s Library series, featuring all the weird biology one could ask, with Mirage out August 2020 and Spectrum, spring 2021. Julie’s edited/co-edited award-winning anthologies of SF/F, including SFWA’s 2017 Nebula Award Showcase and The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis, featuring stories by fans of her series. Her website is www.czerneda.com.

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  SHELLEY ADINA is the author of forty-two novels published by Harlequin, Warner, Hachette, and Moonshell Books, Inc., her own independent press. She holds an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction, and is currently at work on a PhD in Creative Writing with Lancaster University in the UK. She won RWA’s RITA Award® in 2005 and was a finalist in 2006. She appeared in the 2016 documentary film Love Between the Covers, is a popular speaker and convention panelist, and has been a guest on many podcasts, including The Worldshapers and Realm of Books. When she’s not writing, Shelley is usually quilting, sewing historical costumes, or enjoying the garden with her flock of rescued chickens. Find her on the Web at shelleyadina.com, on Twitter @shelleyadina, and on Facebook @magnificentdevices.

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  After leaving molecular biology, DEREK KÜNSKEN worked with street kids in Central America before finding himself in the Canadian foreign service. He now writes science
fiction in Gatineau, Québec. His space opera novels The Quantum Magician and The Quantum Garden were published by Solaris Books. The first was a finalist for the Aurora, the Locus, and the Chinese Nebula Awards. Solaris released his “Godfather in the clouds of Venus” novel The House of Styx in ebook and audio in August 2020, with the hardcover coming in April 2021. Find him at DerekKunsken.com.

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  THORAIYA DYER is an Aurealis and Ditmar Award-winning Sydney-based writer and veterinarian. Her short science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, Apex, Cosmos, Nature, the anthology Bridging Infinity, and boutique collection Asymmetry. Thoraiya’s novels Crossroads of Canopy, Echoes of Understorey, and Tides of the Titans are published by Tor books. Find her online at thoraiyadyer.com or on Twitter @ThoraiyaDyer.

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  GARETH L. POWELL is the author of the BSFA Award-winning novels Embers of War and Ack-Ack Macaque. He can be found online at www.garethlpowell.com.

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  SEANAN McGUIRE is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works, both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. She also writes under the pseudonym “Mira Grant.” Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot. Her novella “Every Heart A Doorway” received the 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novella, the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novella, and the 2017 Locus Award for Best Novella. Seanan lives in an “idiosyncratically designed” labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and, she says, sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard.