I was not disappointed.
Sten is the eponymous saga of a boy at war with his fate: a factory slave, destined to live a short, brutal life in the belly of a planet created specifically for hellish forms of industry. There are eight books in all, detailing how that factory slave beat the odds, went out into the wider galaxy, grew to manhood, had many adventures, and reluctantly attained much glory and greatness—a hero with cement shoes, in the words of Sten’s creators.
You can therefore blame Bunch and Cole for my unconscious tendency to write about ordinary men and women—even boys and girls—who find themselves capable of doing extraordinary things under often terrible and difficult circumstances.
I also think that a lot of the literary flavor—specific word choices and style of word usage—in the Sten series, and also in A Reckoning For Kings, seeps around the edges in my own stories. At an almost unconscious level. Which makes sense. When you read and re-read and greatly enjoy over a million words of prose from the same pair of authors, it’s practically inevitable that they’re going to rub off on you; assuming you too are a writer.
It was only natural that Allan Cole became the first bona fide professional I sought advice from, when I was barely into my twenties and tinkering with my first original stories. I still have yellowed printouts of our e-mail conversations, almost two decades after they occurred. Allan may not know this, but when I was at my worst—down in the dumps, rejected, and barely producing any new prose at all—I would pull out those e-mails and re-read them. As a reminder to myself that a real pro still believed in me.
I was particularly proud, then, to inform Allan of my first professional fiction sale. It’d taken me a lot longer than I’d expected, but I was thankful to be able to point to that story—my winning entry in the 26th annual L. Ron Hubbard presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest—and announce that Allan hadn’t helped me in vain. His investment in time and shared wisdom had at last paid off.
I’ve kept Allan abreast of almost every publishing success I’ve had since.
To make sure he knows it’s still paying off.
Something I’d have cheerfully done with Chris Bunch, too, had he not died in 2005.
The suspected culprit was exposure to and complications resulting from Agent Orange: the infamous deforestation chemical rained on the jungles of Vietnam, back when Chris Bunch had been a Ranger patrolling those jungles. It was Bunch’s experience—in the Army—which infused much of his work with an undeniable air of military authenticity. Something I found strong and compelling as a teen, but which later grew to screaming volume when I myself entered the service.
Chris won’t ever read these words, but I’d like to write them anyway.
Hey Bunch, you know all that stuff, about the military?
Those things you wrote?
It was all true. Every last fucking bit of it.
Thank you. For the stories. And for your service.
And thank you, Allan Cole, for taking the time to coach a hopeful young man who was rough around the edges, but had a lot of big dreams.
Now, some of those dreams are coming true.
***
The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project
There were four of them when they came, driving a nondescript government-white minivan. The moon was full and there wasn’t a cloud in the late August night sky, so I could see them perfectly through the slant-paned windows of the broadcast booth: two men and two women, in suits, and wearing sunglasses.
Sunglasses? At two in the morning?
I’d had visits from the FCC before, but never at this hour.
Something was very wrong.
When they knocked, I put my headphones on the mic boom and potted down the monitor. Standing, I stretched—my sixty-something bones making a series of complaining sounds—and shuffled to the trailer’s front door. Opening it, I saw one of the women directly in front of me, her hands clasped at her narrow waist.
“What??” I said. No need to be cordial. The FCC didn’t like me and I didn’t like them.
“Mister Kelly?”
“Yah.”
“Would you step outside please?”
“Look, I’m on the air. Is this about Andy? Shit, that bastard told me the lawyers took care of it. Shouldn’t you be talking to them?”
“No.”
“Station’s not automated, so I can’t leave the booth unattended, Miss…?”
“Spingath.”
“Spingath. Right. Got an ID to prove to me you’re you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? FCC always carries. It’s in the regs.”
“Maybe it’d be easier if I showed you.”
I waited expectantly, flicking my eyes to the other three who were arrayed in a formation at the bottom of the trailer’s steps. They hadn’t moved, nor said a word.
I looked back to Spingath’s pallid, generically Caucasian face. She reached up and took off the glasses.
It took a second or two for the horror to register in my brain.
Then I screamed.
• • •
K-Powell originally broadcast on FM at just eight hundred watts. We ran straight out of an air-conditioned double-wide set on a half-acre lot just off the shoulder of Utah Highway 276, en route to the Glen Canyon Reservoir. That trailer was also my home, with a partition running down the middle separating the studios from my personal residence. Most days the door in that partition hung wide open, the line between my private and professional lives having long since blurred. On the air people know me as Red Sands, the Voice of the Lake, but all my friends just call me Ron.
The antenna tower is still anchored into the concrete pad I poured for the trailer, and shoots six stories into the scorching desert sun. Back in the late 90s it took a PBS grant and all my early retirement to pay for the land, trailer, pad, tower, second-hand equipment, and government fees. Since K-Powell was a community station, I had to rely on whatever meager donations I could scrape off the locals, and for the first few years it was just enough dough to keep the transmitter warm and my cupboards from going bare.
Times were hard, even for an ascetic like me.
Which is why I couldn’t turn down Andy Chang when he ultimately came knocking.
An avid Powell boater, Andrew Chang was a precocious Californian from the Bay Area who had made a lot of money on stocks, being one of the prescient few who cashed out before the crash. After the crash he had been seen on and around Powell in one of his many expensive cabin cruisers or his lavish house boat—a somewhat flamboyant but still welcome lake denizen with a bulging wallet and an itch to spend.
Before Andy built the dish, he lived exclusively on the water, only occasionally pulling in to gas up, stock up, or check on his finances. While most in his class opted for more traditional haunts, Andy liked the stark natural contrasts of blue water and red desert down at the bottom of Utah. I would eventually find out he loved Powell for its night skies most of all, a view undiluted by man-made light pollution and stretching a gorgeous 360-degrees from horizon to horizon.
One summer evening, presumably while gazing at the faint sparkle-scatter of the Milky Way from the top of his houseboat, Andy had been struck by an idea. No science-lover by any means, he had simply wondered if somewhere out there, around one of those other suns, maybe some other being was resting on top of its houseboat on its lake, staring up at its night sky. What would such a creature have to say to Andy? Moreover, what might Andy have to say to it?
Perhaps the hearty Green River bud—rolled with a helping of Four Corners peyote and clipped to Andy’s ashtray—had had something to do with it. Perhaps he had merely been like a lot of American rich: possessed of great wealth yet lacking a Great Dream to go along with it. In any case, on that fateful night, an idea got itself firmly lodged in Andy’s soul, eventually launching the craziest Glen Canyon project since the Robert Stanton gold dredge.
Within a week Chang motored in
to Bullfrog and made some phone calls. By the following week he was entertaining the necessary contractors and technicians on his house boat, plus two professors Andy had had flown in from the University of Utah. He spent the next month finding appropriate land and haggling with the government for it, then bought a hundred-acre parcel not far from my trailer and set his contractors to work. By the end of the year the dish was complete: a concave metal circle set into a natural bowl in the sandstone, and stretching in diameter almost the length of a football field. Four three-story steel masts sat at opposite edges of the disc and suspended a square cage over the dish’s center, using steel cables. The cage was festooned with a variety of odd-looking gear, the likes of which few of us—even an old radio-hack like me—had ever seen before.
One of the marina shop owners who volunteered at K-Powell and had spent some time in Puerto Rico in the late seventies commented that Chang’s pet project looked not just a little like the famous Aricebo radio telescope, only at quarter scale. Soon afterward the term minicebo was coined and circulated widely around the lake.
Though Andy never officially said so, we all pretty much assumed that minicebo had one and only one purpose: to listen for signals from outer space.
None of us locals dared to wonder how much it had cost to build the thing. Nobody really cared. The extra business and money brought by the contractors kept us all happy.
And it got better. Pretty soon word got out around the rest of the Western United States. By the next summer almost as many people were coming to see minicebo as were coming for the lake itself, and we were enjoying double the regular number of tourist dollars, at least until Andy set up the barbed wire fences and threatening signs.
The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project would be off-limits to unauthorized personnel until further notice.
Crap. Even I was reluctant to see all those extra faces go away. What was good for Bullfrog was good for K-Powell, and with the faddish tourism surrounding the dish officially ended, we on the outside were left to ponder what sort of wealthy insanity was being perpetrated behind the fences and the signs at Andy’s place.
Along with construction of the dish itself, Andy had put up a few auxiliary buildings on his new property, including a cement and glass residential with attached garages for his boats. He started spending more and more time at his new home and less time on the water. There was still no official word as to what the dish was being used for or why, and the fences and signs were understandably intimidating. Some teenagers who once drove up from Arizona to see the dish actually jumped the fences one night, bent on a sophomoric adventure. By morning they and their car were gone, and nobody ever knew exactly what happened to them.
A few of the desert cranks predictably talked UFO jargon and circulated crude flyers about black helicopters. One guy even tried to get on the K-Powell staff, offering to volunteer his life away if only I’d let him use some airtime to push his paranoid ideas. The public has a right to know, man!
But I wasn’t having any of that. I’ve let a lot of interesting characters volunteer for board time over the years, but I stop short of supermarket checkout shit. Andy might have been rich and weird, but he had become a local, and that accorded him respect in my mind. Certainly I’d been called a weirdo plenty of times when I’d first shown up and poured all I had into the construction and launching of the station.
I had my dreams. Andy had his. I figured I owed it to him to stay out of his business.
It was many months before Andy showed up at my door.
• • •
“Mister Kelly,” said one of the men who sat with me in the back of the van. I could smell the stench of my own sweat and fear as they watched me, heads unmoving.
“This is very serious,” said the other woman, who now that I could get a look at her in the van’s dome light, was a near twin of the one who’d surprised me on my steps.
“What are you?” I said.
“That’s not as important as who we are, Mister Kelly.”
The woman who had identified herself as Spingath had replaced her sunglasses, but once you’ve seen something you can’t very easily un-see it. Where a normal person would have eyes, Spingath had had…things. Clusters. I don’t know what to call them. They’d been bizarre and grotesque and I’d known the second she showed them to me that I’d be seeing them in my nightmares for the rest of my life.
None of the four had produced a gun or a badge, but I’d gotten the strongest sense that not doing what they told me to was going to be a Bad Thing.
So now I sat in their van, a best-of Van Morrison spinning back in the K-Powell trailer.
Had I pushed the disc repeat button? I couldn’t remember.
“NSA?” I said, swallowing hard. “DHS?”
“None of the above. We’ve got some dealings with NASA, but we can’t really talk about that. Mister Kelly, what we really want to know is, how involved are you with Mister Chang?”
“This is obviously about the dish?”
“Yes. Mister Chang is operating in violation of several Articles. We need to know how much you’re involved with him.”
I didn’t have the foggiest what they were talking about, but I still had the sense that not doing what they asked would be poor judgment on my part, so I told them what had happened.
• • •
When Chang came clomping up the wooden steps to the trailer’s main entrance, I feared that perhaps my transmitter was causing minicebo some grief. I’m no astronomer, but ever since its completion I’d suspected that a dish like that would be able to detect even the slightest cosmic flatulence from enormously far away. That meant even at a puny 800 watts, my nearby FM transmitter had to be screaming-loud in Andy’s electronic ear.
Andy surprised me when he said the station was not causing him any trouble, but instead he wanted to purchase the services of K-Powell. I sighed with relief and took this to mean he wanted to exchange dollars for publicity. I gave him the obligatory rundown on how community stations differed from commercial stations.
Clad in floppy boater’s shoes, olive-drab shorts, a Giants ballcap, and a crisp, white short-sleeved shirt, Andy listened attentively with his head bent forward.
The crux of the matter was that I couldn’t actually do any paid publicity for him, save for in the form of a bland “friendship” thank-you if he were to donate some dough. I was about to show him one of the custom-screened K-Powell t-shirts I’d bartered from buddies in Bullfrog—Andy’s gift for becoming a listening contributor—when he waved me off.
“That’s not it,” Andy said with a sheepish grin. “What I really want is your airtime.”
“You want to do a show?” I said.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You don’t have to pay me for that,” I replied with a grin. “Just become a volunteer like everybody else. Got a good music collection?”
“Enough discs to fill this trailer.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Yes. And there’s more to it than just me becoming a volunteer. I want to tie K-Powell in with the Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project. Your station will play a vital part in my SETI program.”
SETI? I frowned. Oh great.
“I hate to say this, Andy. As much as I’d love to have you get involved as a music programmer, I’m not interested in any talk shows about space aliens. I get too many of those kinds of offers as it is, ever since you built the dish.”
Personally I have nothing against the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. But I’d put in thirty years bouncing around the professional broadcast business and had had a hard enough time finding intelligent life on Earth, much less finding it out among the stars. I think it’s safe to say I’m with Clarke in that I don’t believe there are any advanced aliens within listening distance of humanity, otherwise they’d have been here already and exterminated us on account of the noise.
I started to explain myself further.
Andy waved me off once again.
/> “I have no intention of using K-Powell as a crazy man’s pulpit. Sure I’d like to get on the air. But not in the way you are assuming. Instead, how would you like to get on my air? I’d be willing to compensate you accordingly. Seems K-Powell could use the funding.”
Andy’s head nodded in the direction of the master mixer behind me: the station’s elderly control board was a rebuilt 70s-era workhorse, the windows for its VU meters badly cracked and the needles waving crazily over a landscape of switches, knobs, duct tape, permanent marker, and torn and faded file-folder labels. I had purchased the vintage beast on the cheap from another public station after they’d upgraded to a digital mixer with sliders.
I got the impression Andy regarded my board with a degree of pity. I might have been offended if I myself did not also regard the board with a mixture of nostalgia and loathing. Keeping it functional had become an increasingly frustrating exercise. The company that built it no longer existed, making spare parts scarce, and it had become permanently infested with nagging malfunctions that introduced a nightmare of hums and buzzes into the output.
Still, I didn’t yet understand what the hell he was talking about, so I looked Andy in the eyes and said, “Explain.”
“I want to run a digital relay between your place and mine, something with enough bandwidth to maintain a clean stereo signal all the way to the dish control house. I’ve spent enough time behind my own microphones at home to realize that I can’t do this all by myself.”
“And what exactly is it that you’re trying to do? SETI involves nothing save for a hell of a lot of listening.”
“The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project is not a normal SETI effort my friend. Other people across the globe with bigger and better brains than mine are already involved in traditional SETI. Maybe at first I wanted to use the dish in this fashion, but before long I realized that the biggest problem is that everyone is standing around waiting for somebody else to speak. I mean, is it any wonder that we haven’t heard from them yet? What if at the same time we’re spending all day long listening for them, they’re spending all day long listening for us?”
Lights in the Deep Page 9
