The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  The Lt. Jon Jarl of the Space Patrol MINIPACK™, by Eando Binder

  The Paul Di Filippo MINIPACK™

  The John Gregory Betancourt MINIPACK™

  The Thubway Tham Thanksgiving MINIPACK™

  OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY

  The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany MEGAPACK™”)

  The Wildside Book of Fantasy

  The Wildside Book of Science Fiction

  Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

  To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

  Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

  Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

  More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery StorieyX is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

  AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL DI FILIPPO

  WILDSIDE: Where are you from originally?

  PDF: I was born in Rhode Island, and have lived here all my life. As I turn sixty this year, I realize this strange little state will always be my home. I love New England in general, and somedays think we should secede. We could do at least as well as Texas on her own!

  WILDSIDE: Which book or short stories are you most proud of?

  PDF: I love all my collections, but I think Ribofunk probably does the best job of presenting a coherent future and a sense of style.

  WILDSIDE: Is there a writer you idolized growing up?

  PDF: I loved so many writers in my youth. I was never one of those readers who forgot who wrote something. I continually scrutinized bylines and looked for more work by my favorites. That early list would include classical stalwarts like Robert Heinlein and Poul anderson and Clifford Simak, to more unconventional folks like J G Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss.

  WILDSIDE: If you could go back in time and meet anyone from history, who would it be?

  PDF: Walt Whitman. I’d ask him how he managed to love all of humanity while still recognizing what bastards and idiots we could be.

  WILDSIDE: Which current authors do you read?

  PDF: As a book reviewer, reviewing nearly 100 books annually, I read a vast range of authors. My tenure as a judge for the Campbell Novel Award brings me into contact with many more. But for sheer pleasure, I turn to vintage mystery novels, by a range of famous and forgotten authors, from William McGivern to Cornell Woolrich.

  WILDSIDE: What drives you as a writer?

  PDF: The old joke is “Paying the rent!” But that’s not totally untrue. Having committed to this career for thirty years now, I am essentially unemployable elsewhere, and so must keep writing to stay fiscally afloat. But of course, that’s a small percentage of my motivations, which include 1) pleasing readers; 2) pleasing myself; 3) trying to improve my art and my skillset.

  WILDSIDE: How can fans best support your work?

  PDF: I would love it if some sales could be generated for my new e-books, available from Open Road Media. Also my print backlist is still out there, including some nice volumes from Wildside.

  WILDSIDE: Anything you want to add?

  PDF: Despite reading works of fantastika for over 50 years now, I remain thrilled and unjaded by the capabilities and potential of the genre. There’s always new miracles ahead of us!

  WILDSIDE: Thank you for your time and consideration!

  LIFE IN THE CARBYNE AGE

  Barnaby Owen was rich by any standards, thanks to his foresighted investments in Mitsubishi’s orbital solar power array. So the pleasant prospect of dining out in one of the world’s most expensive restaurants, the Sherpa Room atop Mount Everest’s summit, just to impress the new woman in his life, did not trouble his e-wallet at all.

  Barnaby was meeting with Mitsubishi executives in Tokyo on the morning of March 23, 2044, when Kiana Mance phoned him with her acceptance of his invitation.

  “Barn Owl, dearest, I’ve cancelled my rehearsal for today and tomorrow, just so we can be together tonight.”

  Kiana was phoning from Rome, where the famous Cirque de la Lune was currently getting ready to open their spring season. Kiana’s act involved her heavily augmented body in an astonishing routine of aerial gymnastics, culminating in a veritable orgy of aerogel clouds, flying miniature transgenic lions, simulated drone attacks, and a soft landing for her nude form modulated by programmable water jets.

  “Wonderful!” said Barnaby with real enthusiasm. Of course, he was sub-vocalizing into his electromyogram mic, while listening to Kiana over his implanted earbuds and enjoying her image on his memtax. Having signalled a break for this important incoming call, Barnaby had tacitly allowed the Japanese executives to agreeably fugue out with their own communications suites.

  Thoughts of Kiana’s talents being employed in his bedroom sent uncommon thrills down his spine. “Let’s see,” he said, “it’s about five thousand kilometers from Tokyo to Everest, and a bit more for you from Rome. Let’s call it fours hours of travel for me and about five for you. I promise you it will be the evening of a lifetime.”

  Kiana ended the call with air kisses, and Barnaby returned to business.

  The nearest Tokyo station for the global hypertube system was moderately busy. But unlike the subways of yore, there was no crowding. Barnaby simply queued up until he reached the head of the line and stepped into a one-person capsule.

  “The Sherpa Room, please,” Barnaby told the system.

  The opaque capsule hermetically sealed itself and was shunted through the airlock interface until it reached the main tube with its partial vacuum, where it was deftly inserted into the traffic stream. Linear induction motors and the capsule’s own air compressor took over to accelerate Barnaby to the 1200 KPH cruising speed. The tube entered the sea at Nagasaki, its carbyne walls fully up to the transition and pressures. Stronger than diamond, stronger than its cousin graphene, self-assembling carbyne had made the creation of the worldwide hypertube transit system possible.

  During his trip Barnaby worked a bit; amused himself by tinkering with various personal endings for last year’s interactive hit, Justice League XII (Barnaby identified heavily with Darkseid); and anal-obsessively reconfirmed his room reservation at the hotel that adjoined the Sherpa Room. Already he could picture Kiana sprawled across the bed there. The image prompted him to call her, but her phone was offline. She must be sleeping, he imagined, as her own capsule barrelled across the Reformed Caliphate toward Tibet.

  At the scheduled arrival time, Barnaby stepped out into the hypertube station atop Mount Everest. An incredible night-time storm was raging impressively here, nearly nine thousand meters above sea level, but Barnaby and the other patrons were safe behind the terminal’s tough walls of microalloy palladium glass.

  Barnaby had a drink in the bar while he awaited the arrival of Kiana’s capsule. The Sherpa Room and its attached hotel were shaped like a Tibetan vajra: essentially, a huge ornamental barbell.

  In a while, Barnaby was rewarded with a solid hug and kiss from the fragrant Kiana, who had stepped out of her capsule fresh and alluring as hothouse turbo-rose. Barnaby knew the evening would be perfect.

  And so their romantic experience was, until, midway through their dinner, every patron of the Sherpa Room received the same emergency phone alert.

  “Attention! The Tibetan portion of the hypertube network has been subject to a terrorist attack by the sinophile Chamdo Battle Group. They have introduced a carbyne-decohering agent into the system. Quarantine of the affected nodes to prevent global contamination is in effect.”

  Looking outside the restaurant, Barnaby was horrified to see the hyperloop connection suddenly dissolve into a sluice of black goop that stained the pristine snow and ice.

  Used to risking her life nightly at the circus, Kiana was nonetheless disturbed. “Barnaby, the authorities must have a thousand crises to respond to! Supplies here are limited. We can’t just sit f
orever. How will they ever rescue us?”

  Barnaby pondered the situation for a moment. He suddenly recalled the talks at Mitsubishi, about improved payload rates into space. Inspiration struck! Quickly he placed a few calls, then polled the patrons of the Sherpa Room for approval of his plan. A majority endorsed the scheme, and the rich clientele even ponied up enough funds to make the rescue operation self-sufficient.

  The guests in the restaurant and hotel, as well as the staff, had plenty of time to secure all the furnishings and to strap themselves in makeshift fashion into comfortable padded chairs. When all the preparations had been made, Barnaby and Kiana sat side by side on a loveseat, gazing up through the glass ceiling.

  “There it comes!” shouted several people at once.

  The titanic carbyne arm of the repositioned Mitsubishi Skyhook swung through the atmosphere in what seemed a lazy manner, although its tip was travelling at eight kilometer per second.

  Barnaby and Kiana found themselves instinctively holding their breath until the Skyhook engaged the barbell’s shaft and lofted the whole pressurized metallic glass structure off its unclamped supports and into space, towards an eventual return to sealevel safety, after a pleasant zero-gee interlude.

  The gee-forces were moderate enough to permit Barnaby and Kiana to embrace and kiss.

  “I promised you it would be the evening of a lifetime, didn’t I, darling?”

  GALAXY OF MIRRORS

  Silent and observant, Fayard Avouris clustered with his fellow chattering tourists at the enormous bow-bellied windows constituting the observation deck of the luxury starliner Melungeon Bride. Their lazy, leisurely, loafers’ ship had just taken up orbit around the uninhabited wilderness world dubbed Youth Regained. Soon the cosseted and high-paying visitors would be ferried down to enjoy such unspoiled natural attractions as the Scintillating Firefalls, the Roving Islands of Lake Vervet, and the Coral Warrens of the Drunken Monkey-mites. Then, before boredom could set in, off to the next stop: the hedonistic casino planet of Rowl.

  Contemplating the lovely, patchwork, impasto orb hung against a backdrop of gemlike stars flaring amber, magenta and violet, Fayard Avouris sighed. This trip had failed, so far, either to re-stimulate his sense of wonder or replenish his intellectual pep.

  A fellow of medium height and pudgy girth, Avouris did not necessarily resemble the stereotypical professor of anthropology, but neither did he entirely defy such a status. He looked rather too louche and proletarian to be employed as an instructor by such a famous university as the Alavoine Academy of Durwood IV. His style of dress was humble and careless, and his rubicund countenance marked him as a fan more of various weathers than library interiors. But a certain pedantic twist to his lips, and a tendency to drop the most abstruse and aberrant allusions into mundane conversation betrayed his affiliation with the independently thinking classes.

  A proud affiliation of many years, which he had routinely cherished up until his nervous breakdown some six months ago.

  The unanticipated mental spasm had overtaken Avouris as he lectured a classroom full of graduate students, his remarks also being streamed onto the astromesh for galactic consumption. His theme that day was the explicable exoticism of the several dozen cultures dominant on Hrnd, ranging from the Whitesouls and their recondite taxonomy of sin to the Gongoras and their puzzling paraphilias. As he recounted a particularly spicy anecdote from his field studies among the Gongoras, involving an orgy featuring the massive “walking birds” of the Faraway Steppes, an anecdote that could always be counted on to hold the audience spellbound, he suddenly felt his own savor for the tale evaporate.

  And then his hard-won mental topography of galactic culture instantly flattened.

  Ever since his own undergraduate days, Fayard Avouris had painstakingly built up a multidimensional mental map of the hundreds of thousands of human societies and their quirks. Useful as an aide-mémoire, this metaphorical model of the Milky Way’s myriad ethnographical topoi resembled a mountain range of human diversity, a splendid chart of mankind’s outre customs.

  But all of a sudden, his laboriously honed virtual creation deflated to a thin pancake of dull homogeneity.

  Whereas previous to this moment Avouris had always seen humans, the only sentients in all the vast galaxy, as creatures exhibiting a practically infinite range of behaviors, suddenly his species seemed to resemble paramecia in their limited repertoire. Like some star collapsing into a black hole and losing all its unique complexion in darkness, all the manifold variations of human behavior born of chance, circumstance and free will now imploded into a kernel of mere instinctual responses to stimuli. Humanity seemed no more than hardwired automatons. Sentience itself, so precious and unique amidst all the organisms in a life-teeming galaxy, appeared more like a curse than a gift. All of humanity’s long variegated history appeared bland and predictable.

  Avouris slammed to a stop in mid-sentence, and froze in place, hands clamped on the podium. A hastily summoned EMT crew had been required to remove him from behind the lectern.

  Alavoine Academy had been very understanding and sympathetic. The tenured holder of the Stridor Chair of Anthropology simply needed a sabbatical; he had been working too hard. A university-sponsored ticket for the next cruise of the Melungeon Bride would solve everything. He’d return invigorated and in top-notch mental health.

  But now, three planets into the cruise, as Fayard Avouris contemplated more sight-seeing—this time, thankfully, on a world devoid of humans—any such recovery seemed increasingly problematical. The matter of how he could ever reawaken his quondam fascination with the antics of his race plagued him. Moreover, he had begun to suspect that his own dalliance with neurosis was not unique—that this affliction was becoming widespread, and that his own anticipatory bout with it reflected merely a greater sensitivity to the zeitgeist.

  On this cruise, Avouris had discreetly probed his fellow passengers, seeking to ascertain their level of excitement regarding their itinerary. The first three stops had occurred at worlds that boasted supremely exotic cultures that deviated far from the galactic norm, a consensual baseline of behaviors continually updated by astromesh polling.

  On the world known as Karoshi, people vied to perform the most odious jobs possible in order to attain the highest social status. The most admired and rewarded citizens, virtual royalty, were those who applied medicinal salves to the sores of plague victims via their tongues.

  On Weebo III, exogamy was enforced to the exact degree that no two citizens could enjoy intercourse unless a different stranger was invited into the affair each time.

  And on Tugnath, a booming trade in afterlife communications involved the perilous enactment of near-death experiences among the interlocutors.

  And here they were now at the edenic Youth Regained, afterwards to be visiting Rowl, Lyrely, Ahab’s Folly, Zizzofizz and Port Canker. Surely, an itinerary to feed a lifetime of vibrant memories.

  And yet Avouris’s companions manifested little real excitement. They seemed bored or apathetic, no matter how bizarre their encounters with oddball races. Why? Not because they were all jaded cosmopolites; many of the travelers aboard the Melungeon Bride were entirely new to starfaring. No, the only explanation that Avouris could sustain involved immunization to the limited ideational space of human customs and beliefs.

  No matter how strange a culture looked initially, upon closer contemplation it became merely one more predictable example of a general class of human behaviors. Death, sex, piety, hedonism, sports, procreative ardor, fashion sense, artistic accomplishment—these few motivators, along with a couple of others, constituted the entire range of determinants for human culture. True, the factors could be combined and permuted in a large number of ways. But in the end, a discerning or even a naïve eye could always unriddle the basic forces at work.

  This sense of a limited ideational space constraining the potentials of the species was what had brought Avouris down with a crash. And he suspected that some
of the same malaise was beginning to afflict the general populace as well, a millennia into the complete expansion of humanity into the peerless galaxy.

  If only other modalities of sentience had presented themselves! Mankind could have had various educational windows to look through, rather than an endless hall of mirrors. But galactic evolution had been cruel and parsimonious with regards to intelligence…

  Flatscreens across the observation deck and on various personal devices came to life with the voice and face of Slick Willywacker, the ship’s obnoxious tummler. Fayard Avouris experienced a crawling dislike for the clownish fellow.

  “Hey-nonny-nay, sirs and sirettes! Prepare to embark for a glamorous groundling’s go-round! We’ll be loading the lighters with the guests from cabins A100 through A500 first. Meanwhile, have a gander at these little imps cavorting in realtime down below!”

  The screens filled with Drunken Monkey-mites at play in the surf. The tiny agile beings seemed beguilingly human, but Avouris knew that they were in reality no smarter than a terrestrial gecko.

  Sighing deeply, Avouris turned toward the exit. Perhaps he’d just sit at the bar and drink all day…

  Startled exclamations and shrieks caused the anthropologist to whirl around and face the windows again.

  In the moment of turning his back upon Youth Regained, the planet had changed radically.

  Where before empty plains and coasts and mountain ranges had loomed, there now reared vast conurbations, plainly artificial in nature. From this low-orbit vantage, Avouris could even make out extensive agricultural patternings.

  Avouris inquired of a stranger. “What happened?”

  The elderly woman replied in a dazed fashion. “I don’t know. I just blinked, and life was altered!”

  The screens had gone blank during this inexplicable and impossible transition. But now they flared back to life.

  A single Drunken Monkey-mite face dominated each display. But this creature resembled the little imps of a minute past only insofar as a lemur resembled a human. This evolved being wore clothing, and stood in a room full of alien devices.