Oceans of space v1 0, p.1
Oceans of Space (v1.0), page 1
02-03-2023
GALACTIC TIDES—
Galactic Tides will sweep you away to distant worlds where adventures await you. From the challenges of exploration and the thrill of discovery to the perils of the unknown and encounters with creatures that could prove to be the staunchest of allies or deadliest of foes, here are sixteen brand-new tales of those intrepid sailors on the seas of space:
“The End Is the Beginning”—Were the Smoothskins mere legend meant to frighten the kits, or was there some truth behind the Great Lie—a truth that an adventurous kit might discover for himself?
“Pyrats”—They had evolved, taken over the spaceways, and now they were preparing to give humans a one-way ticket off of Earth…
“A Matter of Faith”—Was it mutiny or common sense to question your commanding officer’s orders on a mission into the unknown?
More Imagination-Expanding Anthologies
Brought to You by DAW:
OCEANS OF MAGIC Edited by Brian M. Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg. In thirteen original tales some of today’s finest navigators of the magical realms—including Tanya Huff, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mel Odom, Fiona Patton, Rosemary Edghill, Mickey Zucker Reichert, and Mike Resnick—set sail through uncharted waters to distant lands where marvelous adventures await. So grab your treasure map and plot your course to mist-shrouded isles of enchantment in tales that will take you from a dock waif rescued by John Cabot for a voyage into dangers that might only be escaped by magic’s grace…to a sorcerer awaiting the last days of Atlantis…to a spell-spawned encounter with a true Colossus…
MY FAVORITE SCIENCE FICTION STORY Edited by Martin H. Greenberg. Award-winning, career-changing, classic stories by such masters as: Theodore Sturgeon, C. M. Kombluth, Gordon R Dickson, Robert Sheckley, Lester Del Rey, James Blish, and Roger Zelazny; personally selected by such modem-day greats as: Arthur C Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, Frederick Pohl, Connie Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Greg Bear. Each story is prefaced by the selector’s explanation of his or her choice.
SILICON DREAMS Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff. Such trailblazers in the field as Julie Czemeda, Jane Lindskold, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gary Braunbeck, Jody Lynn Nye, and James P. Hogan introduce us to some of the next possible leaps in the development of intelligent life, some of them in startlingly unexpected forms. Here are triumphs and tragedies, cautionary tales as well as visionary ones: Could the last android in existence be preserved from terrorists able to strike at any time and place without warning?…An intelligence that began life in an old man’s left foot soon learned the most important truth of a created being’s existence—enchancement was everything…An alien-built being, how could it resolve the conflict between the knowledge of its original purpose and its loyalty to a human friend?
OCEANS OF SPACE
Edited by
Brian M. Thomsen
and
Martin H. Greenberg
DAW BOOKS, INC.
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER
375 Hudson Street New York, NY 10014
ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM SHEILA E. GILBERT PUBLISHERS
Copyright © 2002 by Brian M. Thomsen and Tekno Books.
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Masterfile Corp.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1218.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
If you purchase this book without a cover you should be
aware that this book may have been stolen property and
reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In
such case neither the author nor the publisher has received
any payment for this “stripped book.”
Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are
registered trademarks. All that are still in commerical
use are protected by United States and international
trademark law.
First Printing, March 2002
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introductions © 2002 by Brian M. Thomsen.
Zambia © 2002 by Dennis O’Neil.
Young as the Mountains © 2002 by C. J. Henderson.
The End Is the Beginning © 2002 by Andre Norton.
Nicobar Lane—the Soul Eater’s Story © 2002 by Mike Resnick.
Message in a Quantum Bottle © 2002 by Tom Dupree.
Pyrats! © 2002 by Jody Lynn Nye.
No Stars to Steer By © 2002 by Ed Greenwood.
Salvor’s Pearls © 2002 by Jean Rabe.
The Wake of the Crimson Hawk © 2002 by Ron Goulart. Sargasso © 2002 by Simon Hawke.
A Matter of Faith © 2002 by Robert Greenberger.
The Old Way © 2002 by Bill Fawcett & Associates Inc.
The Admiral’s Reckoning © 2002 by J. Robert King.
Strings © 2002 by Roland Green.
Last Ship to Haefdon © 2002 by Merl “Bill” Baldwin.
Fragment of the Log of Captain Amasa Delano © 2002 by Brian M. Thomsen.
For C. S. Forester, Nordoff and Hall, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Herman Melville, Dudley Pope, Patrick
O’Brien, and their SF brethren, H. G. Wells and Jules
Verne, and many others who have so eloquently sailed seas before.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LEGENDS OF THE HIGH SEAS AND SPACEWAYS ZEMBLA by Dennis O’Neil
YOUNG AS THE MOUNTAINS by C. J. Henderson
THE END IS THE BEGINNING by Andre Norton
NICOBAR LANE by Mike Resnick
PROTO-PIRATES OF THE GALAXY AND BEYOND
MESSAGE IN A QUANTUM BOTTLE by Tom Dupree
PYRATS! by Jody Lynn Nye
NO STARS TO STEER BY by Ed Greenwood
SALVOR’S PEARLS by Jean Rabe
THE WAKE OF THE CRIMSON HAWK by Ron Goulart
SARGASSO by Simon Hawke
COMMODORES AND COMMANDERS OF THE COSMOS
A MATTER OF FAITH by Robert Greenberger
THE OLD WAY by Bill Fawcett
THE ADMIRAL’S RECKONING by J. Robert King
STRINGS by Roland J. Green
LAST SHIP TO HAEFDON by Bill Baldwin
Fragment of the Log of Captain Amasa Delano by Brian M. Thomsen
Sails ho, matey!
Welcome aboard!
What lies before us is the vast ocean of the
cosmos where the annals of voyages of outer
space freely mix with legends and adventures of
the high seas both metaphoric and actual.
Some of the sailors are honor-bound officers
of navies, others pirates, both practitioners
being human or alien (well, at least alien to the
likes of me).
Keep a watchful eye open, for no one can
anticipate what we might come across when we
be sailing through Oceans of Space.
LEGENDS OF THE HIGH SEAS AND SPACEWAYS
Legends and the sea go together like moonlight and romance. Mermaids, buried treasures, mysterious islands, and far-off destinations need not be earthbound any more than the metaphoric “fish story” of two guys in a bar trading whoppers needs to be a human tale.
An engineered mermaid, castaways in search of a home, or the sea monster of the cosmos—all can exist as legends of the spaceways.
ZEMBLA by Dennis O’Neil
No breeze stirred the Caribbean, and the water was so still that it reflected the stars. He stood on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier anchored off St. Thomas and thought that Janice would love to swim here because Janice loved both swimming and the sea, and then he remembered the letter that burned like a cinder in his pocket. It would have been a “Dear John” letter if his name had been John instead of Bernie: at that particular moment, Seaman Bemie Hobbs, United States Navy.
Janice, his steady date for four years, the girl who became all soft and touchy-feely when he called her his “little mermaid,” dumping him for a college kid!
“Sucks, man,” he told the night and considered, briefly, running to the stern and jumping into the sea. Then he decided, no. He would not kill himself. Instead, he would become…he didn’t know what, exactly, not at that moment. But something! Something great!
He lifted his gaze to the stars and thought: A poet. I’ll become a poet. Why not? He’d always gotten good grades in English and sometimes, parked in front of Janice’s mother’s house after a movie, with frost on the windows, listening to the tick of the cooling heater, when he would whisper the few lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning verse he’d memorized for extra credit, Janice would sigh and tell him that maybe she could stay out another five minutes…
A poet. Outstanding!
But then he remembered what he knew about poets. They seemed to be mushbrains, weepy females like Browning or losers like Edgar Allan Poe—didn’t he die a drunk in a gutter?
Okay, scratch the poet idea. What, then? A businessman? In a brown suit lugging a worn leather briefcase, shoulders slumped, glasses sliding down a nose full of enlarged pores, worried about the trade-in value of last year’s Buick? How great could a businessman bel Not very. Scratch the businessma n. So what else was there?
Not knowing, but vowing to himself to give the question further thought, he turned, proceeded smartly to the ship’s island, went through a hatch, and down a ladder. Crossing the hangar deck, still moving smartly, going toward the forecastle, he met Larry Stephens, the bright little guy from St. Louis who was always reading and listening to newscasts.
“Hey, man, ja hear?” Larry Stephens asked, obviously excited and needing to share news with someone. “Those weird lights in the sky over Madagascar, remember I was telling you about them? Well, they’re alien ships. From another planet. NASA is pretty sure.”
“Yeah, cool,” mumbled Bemie, not pausing, not even looking at Larry Stephens, being rude and not giving a shit.
In about twenty years, after he’d attended hundreds of lectures and read a lot of books—probably way more than Larry Stephens ever read—and even written a few, he would wonder whether meeting Larry Stephens that night might not have been what Dr. Carl Gustav Jung called synchronicity, which, if true, might explain both his later achievements and his eventual fate. Or—and this was both wilder and more appealing to his hard-science training—some undetected quantum event had generated a portal to a parallel universe, providing entry to a spaceship which landed next to him on the flight deck long enough for a strange creature from another planet (with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, maybe?) to tell him, “You can fight it if you want, but you’ll lose. You’re a poet. Start looking for your gutter!” If this latter explanation were true, the visitor would next have had to have tampered with Bernie’s memory and done some major meddling with probabilities, but such pranks might be lagniappe to an alien of even modest powers and abilities.
No ship landed and no alien announced his destiny, not in this universe, which was the only one he had any access to, after all. Instead, he descended into the crew’s quarters belowdecks, mostly ruing the day he ever met Janice but also mulling over what Larry Stephens had told him. Spaceships. Aliens. NASA. E=mc2. Well, Larry Stephens hadn’t mentioned that last—Bernie remembered it from General Science Class in his sophomore year—but it seemed to fit with what Larry Stephens had said. But why? Because it was scientific. The rest of it— spaceships and aliens and NASA—that was all science stuff, too, wasn’t it?
He stopped outside the hatch leading to his sleeping compartment and listened to the rumbles and growls and whines of various machines that operated the huge ship even when, as now, she was at anchor and had his big idea, his life-changer. A scientist. He would become a scientist.
Outstanding! A scientist.
Okay, scientists seldom were famous—there was Einstein and Carl Sagan and he couldn’t think of any more—
(Not then, not standing outside a sweaty-smelling sleeping compartment, he couldn’t, but after two years at the university he could compile a pretty good list: Newton, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Hubble, Tesla, Heisenberg, Archimedes, Franklin, Salk, Curie, Broca, Mendel. Copernicus, Lovelock, Crick, Watson, Darnell—)
And scientists didn’t get girls like athletes did—
(But by the time he completed graduate school, he’d had a round dozen affairs with women ranging from the flaxen-haired assistant television producer to the mousy little education major who, in certain circumstances, was not so mousy.)
And scientists didn’t make much money—
(Depends on how one defines “much”: the week he got his Ph.D. he received offers of two hundred thousand a year plus starting salary from two privately-owned biotech outfits in Northern California, which was not exactly movie star money, but wasn’t exactly burger-flipping money either).
By the time he re-met Janice, he was doing very well indeed, even by movie star standards. There was the salary, of course, which was by now comfortably over twelve mil a year, not counting stock options, and the book royalties, and the lecture fees, and the consultant-ships and that column on the net, actually written by a grad school assistant who was paid nothing more than the great man’s occasional presence, and some little thises and some little thats and a few et ceteras…He was doing just fine. The world, of course, was rapidly going to hell—considering the effects of global warming, the metaphor wasn’t all that metaphorical—and he wondered sometimes how closely his own prosperity was linked to the world’s decline; scientists were pretty shabby saviors, but they were all the saviors people had and people were desperate to be saved, or at least given a reprieve and a bit of hope.
So he had plenty of money, and women weren’t exactly a rarity around the old lab either. But none ever satisfied him, except in a way that, while certainly pleasant, was usually pretty damn gross. Often, as he was engaged in one of those grossly pleasant encounters, he would wonder what an encounter with Janice that didn’t occur in the vicinity of a gearshift lever would be like.
Then, one night, in the midst of a very heated moment, the obvious occurred to him.
“I could find her—my mermaid,” he blurted as he was rolling off a bed. His companion wriggled farther under the sheet and said nothing.
The next morning, he asked a private detective to locate Janice and, it being the age of computerized instant information, the detective called five minutes later with Janice’s married name, cell phone number, address, e-mail address, bank account and credit card numbers and amounts, driving record, favorite restaurant, divorce lawyer, medical history, shoe size…
Wait a minute…Divorce lawyer?
He sent her an utterly charming e-mail—the grad student certainly did have talent—and, after a day’s electronic negotiation, a plane ticket to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. He remembered that the white sand beach was spectacular. And Janice had always loved beaches.
She’d changed in twenty years, which was only to be expected, but he had no trouble recognizing her; a certain physical characteristic was unmistakable. It was her right front tooth—a good ten percent larger than her left front tooth, and two shades yellower. He knew that— he’d always known that; he knew it from the moment he’d first seen her in the school cafeteria, using the tooth to gnaw on a hangnail. He also knew about the eyes that went one way and the knees that went the other, hands like catcher’s mitts, thick ankles, hair the color of the stuff that was left in drainpipes after a bad storm… Nobody had ever accused Janice of being pretty, but, when his friends wanted to compliment his girlfriend, they called her “cute.” At seventeen, which was her age when she’d sent the letter to the aircraft carrier, the tooth, eyes, knees, hands, ankles, and hair may have, in fact, combined—alchemically?—to produce cute.
At forty, however—
“I’d know you anywhere,” he told her, perversely pleased not to be lying.
“You, too!” she answered enthusiastically, in a voice that was as cute as everything else about her.
He pulled his sunglasses down from the top of his head to their proper position on the bridge of his nose and looked around: Janice, sand, sea, sky, sun, hotel, old people, young people, guard towers, more sand, and Janice again, unchanged.
“Shall we go for a swim?” he suggested.
“Oh, I don’t go inna water anymore,” she replied. “’Sbad for my skin, the salt and all. You go ahead, you wanna.”
“Perhaps a bit of lunch, then?”
“Maybe a little,” she said, and giggled, and somehow he knew what she would say next and he hoped, desperately, that he was wrong, and wasn’t. “A girl’s gotta watch her figure.”
