Universe Between

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Table of Contents

  Foreword: Balancing Act

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Introduction: That Space on the Line

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Slow Answer

  Lee Allred

  One-Night Stands for Love and Glory

  David H. Hendrickson

  Lunar Command: Dark Side

  Richard Alan Dickson

  Are We Alone in the Universe?

  Darcy Pattison

  Unsubscribe

  Phaedra Weldon

  The Sun Dial Trail

  Rebecca S.W. Bates

  The Mooring Buoy

  Jamie McNabb

  Slow World

  Steven Mohan, Jr.

  Snake Bi

  Kellen Knolan

  Between the Lines

  Karen L. Abrahamson

  Perfect Notes

  Scott William Carter

  The Space Between Hope and Dreams

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The Atlantis Fifty

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Sky in the Ground

  Rob Vagle

  About the Editor

  Copyright Information

  Foreword

  Balancing Act

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  As I write this, the annual anthology workshop that we hold for professional writers is one week in the past. Dean and I teach it, along with John Helfers and Kerrie L. Hughes. This year, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta joined us for the first time.

  We had a blast. We always do. We assembled parts of six anthologies, talked to fifty pros (not us), and learned a lot.

  What I always get reminded of—even after years of doing this—is just how personal editing is. It’s like writing, in a way. When you give fifty writers a topic, you’ll get fifty extremely diverse stories. When you give six editors fifty stories, the editors will argue—vociferously—over which is the best.

  At our workshops, the editor with the checkbook wins. His vision (or hers) defines the anthology.

  That’s why we hire different editors—so that Fiction River remains fresh and different and exciting.

  As one of the series editors, I read every word of every story published in Fiction River. But I don’t give the other editor’s volumes as much thought as I give my own. I trust the other editors to do the job they’ve been hired for, because I know they’ll do it well.

  So tonight, when I sat down with the contents of Universe Between in its proper order, I felt pleasantly surprised. I remembered all the stories—of course—but I had forgotten which volume they were going in. I loved each story in here, and the order that Dean placed the stories added just a bit of shine to each as they played off each other.

  Editing itself is a bit of a universe between. It’s creative—like writing—and it’s passive—like reading. But it’s neither reading nor writing. It’s a completely different endeavor, a balancing act on the line that crosses from creating to enjoying.

  I love this volume of Fiction River.

  I believe you will too.

  —Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Lincoln City, Oregon

  March 9, 2014

  Introduction

  That Space on the Line

  Dean Wesley Smith

  A sometimes simple, sometimes complex line exists between space and atmosphere, between love and hate, between dark and light, between freedom and slavery, between war and peace. Each one of us has a line in us between good and evil, between Yin and Yang.

  In everything, every decision, every vista, there always seems to be a line dividing one part from another, one side from another. Physical lines or belief lines, it doesn’t seem to matter.

  There always seems to be a line.

  To fiction writers, any dividing line, when looked at close enough, magically expands to show universes full of stories.

  And thus, the title Universe Between for this Fiction River anthology.

  As a writer, I love writing stories in those lines, along those lines, drifting back and forth across those lines between two halves of anything. I find that writing stories showing both sides of a divide can have a power all their own.

  And often truth and happiness lies on the line, something our culture here in 2014 has seemed to have sadly forgotten.

  So as an editor, when I asked a number of professional fiction writers to give me stories for this anthology, I needed the story to illustrate in one fashion or another a clear line of one form or another. That was their only mandate.

  I didn’t give restrictions that the story needed to be fantasy or science fiction or mystery. And the writers came through for me with a wide array of great stories covering many genres as is normal for most Fiction River volumes.

  But that said, since I invited a lot of science fiction and fantasy writers, science fiction and fantasy are the major genres where most of the stories in this anthology live.

  Writing stories that sit on a line between two divergent halves and using a science fiction or fantasy setting allows writers to illustrate human conditions that are happening today, without actually writing about that event and polarizing one side or another.

  In a number of these stories, the line between two cultures becomes the focal point. How does one side understand another side when the other side seems completely alien to the other?

  Does that sound familiar in our real world today?

  Maps of countries, the borders, the lines between countries can be redrawn at will it seems. It happens almost every year in our world and that topic is a central focus in this volume as well.

  Sometimes the line is simply a surface, such as the surface of the ocean. The unknowing world on the other side of that surface line can really be amazing and sometimes deadly.

  Sometimes the line is time.

  Time is the great moving line, always dividing the future from the past. Every day we all fight that moving line in one form or another. But in a few of these stories, that line can be crossed, altered, or expanded in ways that only top professional science fiction writers can do.

  So I’m glad you’ve joined into this journey. Think of this volume as a ship transporting you between the lines, down the lines, across the lines into places and cultures that I hope will entertain you, make you think, and most of all, keep you reading.

  So please turn the line, the page, between the end of this introduction and the first story.

  See what I mean? There is always a line.

  Enjoy.

  —Dean Wesley Smith

  Lincoln City, Oregon

  March 8, 2014

  Introduction to “Slow Answer”

  Lee Allred exists in many universes. He scripts comics for DC, Marvel, and Image Comics. His marvelous short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, anthologies from Baen Books, and most recently, in Fiction River: Time Streams. In keeping with his universe-bounding, he will edit the next Fiction River special, titled Valor.

  Lee served three tours in Iraq, and retired at the rank Master Sergeant. He traded the heat of the desert for the damp of the Oregon Coast.

  About this story, he writes, “I grew up in a remote rural area without any daytime radio stations. As a result, I learned to work without music playing in the background. The younger troops of the iPod generation I worked with, though, they acted like they’d shrivel up and die without music constantly blaring—even in Iraq. This story comes as an outgrowth of that: What would our world be like if we suddenly couldn’t listen to music any more?”

  Slow Answer

  Lee Allred

  I slid onto my usual barstool. The worn red leather seat cover crackled und
er my weight. Nick’s Place had seen better days. Its chrome diner-style barstools were wobbly. The once-bright paint on the walls had faded to a mousy beige. The old jukebox hunkered down in a far corner, its innards holding a single lonely record, seldom used.

  But the joint was quiet and clean and, after all, hadn’t the entire globe seen better days since the Invaders came? Nick’s Place served my needs. It was across the street from my place and it served booze. The rest—the décor, the ambiance, the wobbly barstools, the lack of customers—were incidental.

  Nick Slattery, the proprietor, nodded as I sat down. I held out two fingers to order my usual, but I needn’t have bothered. Nick had already started pouring my usual the moment he saw me walk in.

  My usual.

  My usual drink. My usual barstool. My usual time to walk into Nick’s joint. These days the only thing keeping me sane is a dogged adherence to a usual routine, artificial as that routine might be.

  If you can call the thoughts I think in the dead of night sane, that is.

  Nick poured my usual: two whiskies neat. Not a double. Two singles.

  Again a pattern to cling desperately to.

  Nick whistled an old Sinatra standard as he walked my drinks over. I liked Nick’s whistle. Clear, strong, on-key. We were the only two in the place. He set the drinks down and started polishing the section of the bar next to me.

  “‘Set ’em up, Joe,’” I said, trying to place the tune.

  Nick shook his head. “‘One For My Baby,’” he corrected, “‘And One More For the Road.’”

  It’s a little game we play to pass the time in the half hour between when I down my first shot glass and my second. I try to guess what he whistles and where it came from and then Nick patiently corrects me. With an exception or two, my memory’s pretty fuzzy when it comes to old records and old movies.

  Twenty years without either is a long, long time to try to remember.

  I stiff-wristed my shot glass. “Tender Trap. Frank’s a bum of a piano player. Falls for Doris Day. Sings that song to a bartender.”

  Nick shook his head. “Tender Trap’s the one with Debbie Reynolds,” he said. “Young at Heart. Doris Day.” He polished some more. “Not that it matters.”

  No, not that it matters.

  Not that anything matters any more.

  Not since the Invaders came. Not since they came and forced a perfect world down our throats, whether we wanted one or not. A perfect world with a price.

  “I miss movies,” I said—stupidly!—and I downed my second drink a half-hour early. The devil with my pattern and the devil with clinging to sanity.

  I jabbed two fingers out again.

  I was about to order one for my baby and one more for the road, but there wasn’t any road. Not anymore. No roads left for human beings. No place left to go. No place to run.

  Nick stopped polishing. “I think you’ve had enough for a while.”

  Oh, he didn’t mean it literally. I could drink myself under the table and the moment I stood up—or slid off my barstool on the way to the floor for that matter—the nanites the Invaders had rammed down my gullet and down the gullet of every man, woman, and child on Earth would kick in, and I’d instantly sober up. Whatever alcohol in my bloodstream would get shunted aside. I’d have a nice, non-debilitating buzz for as long as the alcohol I’d consumed lasted, but I couldn’t leave Nick’s Place drunk if I’d wanted.

  And I wanted. How I wanted.

  The muffled plinking of a piano banging out a show tune seeped through the back wall. Nick’s place adjoined a small theatre.

  Nick went back to polishing again. “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to take the night off and go see a show.” He titled his head in the direction of the faint piano plinks. “It’s not like you have to work tonight or anything.”

  It wasn’t like anyone on the entire planet had to work. Free food, free clothes, free just about anything and everything, courtesy of the Invaders. Along with the nanites, they’d given each of us our own Santa, little grapefruit-sized devices that produced whatever we wanted whenever we wanted it, like the Shoemaker’s Elves.

  I looked around again at the not-so-genteel shabbiness of the place. Nick could have gotten new furnishings, new everything just for the asking—he had a Santa right there by the cash register, its indicator lights dimming and glowing as it bleeped and purred, but Nick was too stubborn to use one. He preferred running his place the old fashioned human way, even if it meant making do with wobbly barstools and peeling paint. He only “spent” on upkeep what he “sold” in drinks. Kept a double-column ledger and everything. And I thought my sanity hung by a gossamer thread.

  “Why do you do it?” I asked Nick. “Run this place, I mean. You could retire, travel…”

  Nick picked up a shot glass and held it up to the light, checking for dishwasher spots. “Sure, sure. I could travel. Run down to Acapulco, maybe. And when I got there, what then? Enter a Mexican joint for a belt only to find Mexican Nick had closed up shop and traveled up here on vacation? Be pretty silly, wouldn’t it. Naw, I stay here for all the other people who decide to retire and travel.”

  He set the glass back on the shelf with its brothers. “Besides, there’s only so much close to nothing you can do before you start going out of your coconut. Especially when you’re going to live forever.”

  The nanites again. We didn’t yet know if we were truly immortal now, or just so long-lived the difference didn’t much matter. Since the nanites, not a person had died of old age. In fact, just the opposite. Nanites reversed the aging process.

  Nick and I’d both been in our late sixties when the Invaders came. We looked now to be in our early forties.

  But why tend bar?” I persisted. “Keeping busy doesn’t necessarily mean working here.”

  Nick shrugged. “Look. Some birds gotta fly and some birds gotta swim. Me, I gotta tend bar.” He waved a hand over in the direction of my place across the street. “Just like you gotta do whatever it is you do in that loft at night after you leave my place. Now, I ain’t asking any questions what it is you do; not any of my business. I just can tell it’s something you gotta do or you’d dry up and blow away.”

  He picked up the two empty shot glasses in front of me. “But if you want my advice, you’ll take the night off.”

  Customers started trickling in. The Happy Hour crowd. Nick left me to take their order.

  I got up to leave but I never made it to the door.

  An Invader entered the bar.

  ***

  You’ve seen them before, or at least pictures of them. Vaguely humanoid, eight feet tall with elongated torso and limbs. Two arms and legs with two stunted dorsal appendages wrapped in velveteen coverings emerging from his back where the shoulder blades would be on a human.

  Like all Invaders this one had a woebegone face haloed in a corolla of some sort of golden bioluminescence. He was dressed in a close approximation of contemporary human clothing, something that almost looked like a gray sharkskin business suit, slacks, and black oxfords.

  He looked first at me and Nick, nodded, then ignoring everybody else walked straight for that battered old jukebox in the corner. The evening crowd scattered in his wake. The Invader stooped and started jabbing the selection buttons. Nothing happened of course.

  Nick, either totally unfazed or able to fake it a lot better than I could, rattled a metal Bandaid can full of nickels he kept at the counter. “Runs on these, pal.”

  The Invader nodded and produced a nickel out of thin air with a wave of his hand. He pressed B-17 and the record carrousel clattered. The only record in the machine dropped to the platter. The playing arm set down with a sckritch and “Slow Answer” by Ria Calvin started to play.

  An organ chord and soft cymbal roll led into the simple piano introduction.

  “Slow Answer” was the only record anybody anywhere on Earth was allowed to own or play, the only reason the Invaders had come to Earth.

  Caltech had sent out a
deep space satellite probe for aliens to find back when I was just a graduate student there, a probe sort of like the ancient Voyager I, only instead of a very limited gold record containing the music and sounds of Earth, we’d used a self-playing solid state memory hard disk containing several petabytes of video, pictures, and music.

  One of those songs was “Slow Answer.” It was just the B-side of an old lackluster single by a midlist pop vocalist. Totally forgettable—except that it was the only thing on those petabytes of material the Invaders cared about.

  They arrived in force, effortlessly brushing aside our defenses like cobwebs with a housewife’s broom. They then did two things: gave us utopia and gave us an ultimatum. We were to surrender all musical recordings, all devices and technologies capable of recording or playing musical recordings—all except the song “Slow Answer.” That we could listen too.

  To world leaders it seemed like a fair trade at the time (not that we’d had a choice): an end to poverty, sickness, hunger, and old age in return for a few recorded songs and song players. After all, we were still allowed to perform live music. How much sacrifice could giving up recorded music be?

  We soon learned. The Edict covered more than just a teenager’s music pod. It covered nearly every aspect of modern electronics: movies and television, telephone and internet, computers, smart phones, magnetic tape, even wax disc gramophones. Overnight, humanity went from the Information Age back to a pre-telegraph Nineteenth Century.

  Worse, the Invaders rigidly enforced it. Anyone who violated the Edict and tried to play or record proscribed media, even in the most soundproof room of the deepest secretest government facility, instantly vanished. Disappeared into thin air, like a soap bubble popping. The person, the equipment, the media.

  Except for “Slow Answer.” But only the same Ria Calvin recording included on the probe. Covers, other versions—even Ria’s own cut from her live album—fell under the Edict.