"Cars of Darkness" excerpt

"I'm Billy, and I bet you're looking for one of those hybrid cars."

"That's right. My name is Art. How could you tell."

"You have the look of someone who walks a lot. And your shoes are well worn at the soles, so I guess you walk a lot. You probably wouldn't be buying a car at all if it didn't get 50 to the gallon. What kind of car you think I'm looking for?"

"I'd say a bigger car than they sell here." Billy liked that, laughed loud enough to get one of the busy sales clerks to notice him. But really, I'd bet you are looking for something for your business fleet."

January 22, 2005

"Fleet? Yeah, I guess fleet is the right word for it. Like Columbus going to Portugal to buy ships. Did Columbus buy ships in Portugal?" The sales clerk also seemed to notice the word "fleet".

"That could be right. I don't really know. I know the Portuguese had something to do with it. He himself was Italian, wasn't he?"

"He totally had it wrong, where he was going, you know? I mean Columbus." Billy seemed to want to distract himself from the task of buying a car. "I'm thinking of the hybrids, too, if you want to know the truth. The problem is my height. I have a really long torso, so I have to lean over when I sit in a small car." Looking at him, I wasn't so sure he had to worry about his height at all. The model sold here had a dome-style roof, so it probably accommodated his height and mine just fine. It was Billy's width that made him seem too big for the car. His biceps were as wide as my upper leg, his chest was half again as wide as mine. And I'm not a slight person. Because of the mention of Columbus I found myself imagining Billy pulling out a watch cap, slapping it on his head, and shouting orders to some unseen deck hand high above our heads on a rope ladder. What life's labors had made him into such a mountain? And why did he strut around like he owned the place?

"Well, that's why I said you should try the bigger ones. There are some trucks that'd be--"

"Listen, I know trucks. They seem like they'd be safe, I mean isn't that why people buy 'em?'

"Or they have lots of cargo, but, yeah."

"But that's the fucked up thing. Pardon my language. They aren't even as safe as the little cars. They had that whole thing a few years ago with the roll-overs." Now a couple other waiting customers were looking in Billy's direction. They watched his face like people watch television: not shy about staring at him, nodding with agreement or shaking their heads in dismay, as if they were listening to Howard Stern or President Bush. "You can't get around that high center of gravity, no matter how good your seat belts are. Plus your visibility really sucks. But you'll be amazed, most of all, because of how cramped it feels when you sit inside it. Big cars are small and small cars are big. That's all there is to it." When he took a breath, turned to the side and looked at me out of the corner of his eye, I thought he'd get a round of applause.

"Sound" excerpt

Tom remembered he had been looking for a cave, armed with a strong lamp, climbing gear, and a supply of food ample for two or three days, when the fall happened. It was his week off from work at the Universal Transport Agro division; his first week off in over two years. Being an amateur naturalist on account of his rural background, Tom was more comfortable among the winds, the woods and the screeching night noises than most of his fellow factory-workers. A little cave-climbing would be good for his mental health.

There was a blind hole near the entrance to the cave. Tom had found himself falling ten meters or more, fearing for his life. It was his luck to land in water, deep, cold, and dark as death. By the time he reached hard ground, mainly uninjured, he found most of the supplies were gone, except for a tiny head-lamp he kept in his breast pocket, along with maps, pencil and paper, and various tools. After a few dives into the pitch-black water had proved useless in recovering his supplies, Tom sought to locate the way out. He had been lost in caves before, so his level of panic was still low. Only when Tom stumbled onto the passage by the tiny waterfall did he find himself losing his mental bearings.

First there had been the sound of falling water, which was a likely indicator of a way out of the cave; then the surprising discovery of what seemed like a large room behind the waterfall, then the shafts of what looked like daylight. Excited, Tom stumbled toward the light, and all at once found himself in the forest, with the sound of the music (or the frog) in his ears.

As he followed the girl along the trail, Tom fought the impulse to ask her all the questions in his mind. She appeared to know already how lost he was, and it would not do to reinforce the impression of his helplessness. The trail left the forest at once, and opened up upon a small farmhouse where an athletic figure split wood next to a great pile of firewood that indicated the morning's work was nearly done. The sight of smoke coming from the chimney made Tom realize how hungry and tired he was.

Yam Story Excerpt 3

After holding forth for quite some time, Arthur shocked Noah by saying they ought to turn in. “We have plenty of culture to live, I reckon”, he declared. It would be a relief to de-focus from the aura of weird that was Arthur. As Noah dozed off he toyed with naming the phases he’d seen Arthur seamlessly cycle through: scared watcher on the plane; eager boss-follower at Lars’s house; fretting paranoid at the dinner; chatting academic after supper. What fueled all this? Not just the stress of the trip on its own, or the whole resort would feel like an American mental ward.

The next day, the resort became an American mental ward. A general scurry seemed to be in progress. The hippy-looking couple, who were just next door to Noah and Arthur, were complaining to the house staff about the rats they had heard in the night. Noah walked by just in time to hear the chambermaid swear there were no rats in Kaokara—laughable since he had heard them himself, but never thought to complain about it. Of course there were rats here.

Before he reached breakfast Noah was accosted by Carlton, the eldest of the trainees, who was making a list of names of people who didn’t get hot water at their morning showers. On behalf of the more delicate palates in the group, Suzette was conferring with an impatient cooking staff on the subject of breakfast options. Pete and Carol were discussing what sounded to Noah like lost luggage. Dennis exited the public loo swearing about the toilet paper. Noah looked around at the faces of his companions at breakfast. The only eyes that weren’t wild with some sort of panicky discomfort were those of the two former missionaries, Amy and Michael. Whatever calm-juice they are drinking, Noah thought, laughing inwardly, I’d like to get about five gallons of it. As Noah joined the couple, Mike recommended the sausage, then quietly intoned—smirking—that there were some misplaced expectations regarding the hot water.

Earth 2 (fiction excerpt)

The news on the radio was plain enough, as all had come to expect from the Republic. There was movement in such-and-such province of China, toward the sea. Flotillas of unarmed civilians were being shuttled from here to there, probably in preparation for an attack; the enemy, which was China this time, had proven unwilling to negotiate several points of importance to the Republic. Military arrangements were now underway but diplomacy was to be exhausted fully before any Americonian forces would be committed to defending...

"They tell us exactly nothing," Katie would say. 

Sonny spoke up, "You know how I can tell they're going to get us into another war? The way they keep telling us they absolutely won't get us into a war."

An older neighbor nodded. "It's a sure sign."

One of Katie's farm hands brought lemonade and something strong to add to it, for those who might prefer it. The radio droned on but only Sonny stayed close enough to it to hear what followed. Two hours later, when some of the recruitment-aged youths began asking about fighting and traveling to foreign places, Dumar found Sonny still listening to all the fluff programming that came after the news. 

"If you can tear yourself away from the dancing fish-men, there are some green-horns you should be scaring."

"I'd be happy to scare some youngsters. But what do you think I'm listening to here?"

"It must be the ads, because I know you hate the evening programs."

"That's right, Pop. Stay a minute and listen to what they're advertising."

In a few minutes the host of Dancing Fish-Men politely ceded the airwaves to their sponsor, Unversal Transport: 

Thousands of job opportunities in industries overseas. Farming, manufacturing, communications, education and more. Many jobs provide and require only an able bodied volunteer with current papers and a clean bill of health. Seek your adventure abroad and send your pay home to the family!

"It's just some trick the armed forces are using. Isn't it?"

Sonny looked his dad in the eye. "The army's running warnings on the radio about how dangerous it is to travel. Or those standard low-budget recruitment speeches by old veterans..." Scare you into thinking the only way to be useful in this world is to step up to the danger."

"Somebody begs to differ." Dumar nodded at the radio and Sonny rolled his eyes.

"Freeing up the highways for the adventurers and profiteers, making sure the cautious and the infirm stay at home. They've always done it like this."

Dumar found it poetic when his sons spoke to him with authority he used to speak to them. The schooling had been worth it, but there was no way both sons could be happy as a farmer, as Dumar had been. It was fine with Dumar. He understood the times didn't call for settled men; Dumar sensed there was a change due. If his sons could be part of it, so much the better. 

Your damn tevee set

Beer it up ya pigs-ya don't fool me with your wattayacallits all throbbin for some dangerous sports but a comfortable evening like phony Henry David Thoreaus running back to mommy for a roast beef, not worrying about doing the laundry and waiting for it to dry like I did or having the Plymouth seize up on you right there at your girlfriend's house with her angry dad waiting for a reason to tell her to go back to Mr. Football Dickhead. You guys never had to go through this and tha's why I thing you're jerk-offs. But fuck you rich kids. Fuck you I got bigger things to deal with.

Things like, what happened to me during the 25 years since I have started having this thought. Which, by the way I still have all those thoughts; none of them ever left my head. I keep plenty of room in there for them because number one it's as big as a warehouse and number two I throw away all the things that matter to the rest of the world that I don't get like what the heck is an atom I don't care. None of you are listening but if you are listening I think you're jerks and I haven't forgotten what it was like with the damn Elvis Costello music until 2:00 am and the hauling me out in the snow naked because of what I did to JK. And by the way JK needed to be taught he wasn't cock-of-the-rock but the message doesn't get through to him when you all take his side like that. Yeah, it was 25 years ago but I didn't forget. Just like CR probably remembers me flushing his stupid Men at Work down the toilet. Screw him and his stupid tv set. I wanted to kill him when that thing showed up.

About Ferro

Some planets, like some villages, are made up of the peaceful, wise, but easily manipulated. An out-of-the-way world is not as likely to learn war and diplomacy as
one that is constantly in the line of fire. The peaceful become the the enslaved, with a few aggressive strokes of the opportunistic, shrewd, warlike neighbor.

Ferro's people learned quickly that their attackers, who called themselves the Chosen, were a brutal and methodical enemy. The Chosen, for their part, failed to see the madness of a plan to exterminate the Ferrans. After decades of brutal combat, the technologically advanced attackers had to admit that some other force was at work, protecting the Ferrans. Highly efficient war machines became ineffective upon their deployment on Ferro, time after time. Only with smaller, cruder, much more bloody tools could the natives be subdued. The fighting force of the invaders became disgruntled, frightened, demoralized by a strange, demonic (for they were highly religious people) presence.

The very name Ferro became synonymous with frustration in the home language of the Chosen, as the natives fought on for an entire generation against the overwhelming technological advantage of the strangers. The Advange, as the mysterious force came to be known, could not prevent rivers of Ferran blood from flowing, but the passing years of conflict served to strengthen their resolve, for what race of people in all of history would surrender their very homeland, even if hope had been reduced to a single fighter against ten thousand.

There were many reasons for the Chosen to stubbornly fight on as well: mainly they were economic, for the Chosen home world was an overpopulated, needy world, weary from thousands of years of prosperity and conquest, endless growth and a bloated class of aristocrats whose demands weighed heavily on the workers, soldiers, pilots and wage-earners who faithfully marched forward to whatever adventure their leaders undertook. The Ferran undertaking was nothing more than an attempt to harvest the plenty of this world to provide for the vast population at home. To the Ferrans, the Chosen became known as the Parasites.

The Ferrans experienced a great deterioration of their once proud society. Not a highly technological people, still the Ferrans had a rich history, religion, education system, as only an ancient grown to maturity can obtain. The Chosen could never fathom that the Advantage was something outside the realm of technology and faith as they knew it. In fact much of the technology of the Chosen had come from other societies, through centuries of trade. As faith reigned supreme over the Chosen, much of the life of the universe remained a mystery to them.

The Ferran's Advantage grew weaker with time. Great cities were abandoned, the native people fled to the less fertile ground of the hinterland, leaving the prime farming, mining, and other natural resources to the invaders. No treaties were ever signed; no official cessation of hostilities ever occurred. Commerce began to flow, to the advantage of the Chosen. But it was always laden with complications, which was blamed on the local Demons for centuries of domination by the Chosen. Eventually much of the commercial endeavor on Ferro came to a halt. The only profit-making enterprise was a series of mines, which changed hands so often that no one could keep track of who was the real owner.

A subcontractor from another civilization came to Ferro to manage the mines. No superstitions would prevent these people from doing their work, as long as the pay was good, for they came from a desperately impoverished line of people descended from Earth and Earth 2, a pair of befouled worlds plagued with many of the same problems as the Chosen, but fully five hundred years behind technologically and politically. To the Chosen, the Earth-humans were not nearly as ferocious as the Ferrans, nor as easily frustrated as their own working classes, so they fit the job of working Ferro's mines.

Through the transitions the Ferrans remained at a distance, living in the shadow of their former civilization as strangers from other world mined steel and coal from below the surface of their own home world. To the Earth-humans, the locals on Ferro were known as Cannibals, which title dated back to the original battles. Stories of the Advantage had been twisted to include ritual bloodletting to a heathen god, whose power lasted until the true God of the Chosen had blessed the place.

To the Earth-humans these stories were distant and strange and beside the point. They needed to make a living, and they would keep to themselves of left alone.

Mines & Memories (fiction excerpt: Return to Ferro)

There's a guy out here that'll make you laugh every time you think about him. Irritating, mostly, but then also filled with so much humorous hooey that I can't help but kinda like him.

Half of what he says is so blasphemous you about bite your tongue off the first time he talks to you. Instead of getting arrested he just keeps on showing up each day in the mine (he works good and hard, I'll give him that), then putting in his couple hours of rhetoric at night.

And there's plenty old Mike could get arrested for. Says were' all living for the machine, and that the old way was that the machine lived for us. Says we used to be in a village like the cannibals, and that if we took a good look at an honest cannibal we'd call him friend quicker than you and I would call each other friend. Says a cannibal is a right respectable person, except for the eating people part of it, which we don't even know for a fact.

And this is where old Mike gets me laughing. Somebody always says to him, Mike, don't you watch the bulletins at night? Hell, there's always someone showing up on their with a vicious bite out of his shoulder or a missing foot, or found torn to pieces, or gone altogether. But Mike says those are nothing but mining accidents they made up to look like someone done chomped on the guy, and he says those people who make the bulletins are nothing but a bunch of crooks and liars, and we miners should be able to figure that out for ourselves, and of course we have a grand old time fighting with him about it until Clyde the foreman comes along and tells everyone to shut the f up and show some respect to the hard working stiffs who are trying to get to bed early instead of playing cards and screaming ourselves hoarse about all this cannibal nonsense. Then he gives Mike a lot of hell right in front of the other guys, telling him he ought to grow up and it's no wonder he never made foreman after all that hard work.

Funny thing is, though, Clyde really likes Mike when we're all down in the mine, and anyone would admit he's the best guy to have your back when things get sticky, which they do. Mike knows how to work some pretty magic with an infected hand or a breathing problem; he keeps a first aid kit with some unusual potions and things, but never talks to people about where he got it, or why he's not a doctor if he knows how to heal you.

One strange fellow, that Mike. If you pay him a compliment (which a guy will always do if another guy just fixed up a big fat cut on his hand), he just says it's all from memory.

"What's all from memory?" I asked him once.

"All of it. Work, laughter, pain, healing. It's all from memory."

And that's the scariest thing the man can say because everyone knows the old saying Memory is a burden, and we all have enough of those. Or, remember your work and forget all the rest, or all the prayers to God to free us from our past to allow us better to see the light.

These are true enough words for me, and so is live and let live, so I don't report Mike to anyone. And I don't think it would make any difference if I did. The law don't need to worry about a guy like him who rocks the boat. After all, memory? I mean, who the hell needs a toothache like that? What's in my memory from today? Work. And what about yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that? Work.

"What's the earliest thing you remember?" says Mike, to one of the young guys. The guy says he remembers that time they showed us the girl. A real, living woman here at the big hall where they do the speeches and political stuff. Mike says, "that was only like two years ago. What about before that? What about Todd?" Mike says. And then it gets quiet. Then some guys get to talking that you couldn't forget Todd even if you wanted to because the guy was such a scrub. Looked like a tree that turned into a man. Not a tree like the ones they make beams from, but one of those trees along the path to the administrator's mansion, kind of pretty and skinny and weak-looking. But for as weak as he looked he could kick some ass down in the mines. Carried my ass out of the mine one day and I'm like 110 kg. That was when I hit my head and I was no good for anything for a couple days. I KNOW that was more than a couple years ago.

So I tell Mike all about it, even though the whole memory thing is really a pain; those old proverbs exist for good reason. I could forget all about a guy like Todd, but I'm glad I didn't, and that makes me uncomfortable at the same time.

Then along comes Mike's questions to make a person more uncomfortable. "What else do you remember about Todd?" And just like that, there's a blank space. I say whatever you say about a person who's gone.

"Cannibals?"

"You really think that? Or is that something you say to shut me up?"

I laugh at Mike like I laugh at anyone or anything that's getting to me. He laughs too, but not in a pissed-off way. He laughs to say, don't worry about it. I can't help feeling like I wish I knew what became of Todd. I and I know I knew once. And I figure Mike knows but to hell with his lessons. I yawn, and stand up to go hit the sack. I know I'll forget about this in a minute or so, or if not, when I'm asleep.

But I don't. In fact, I dream about that guy Todd. He's floating out there, in the sky, like they say happens to the dead, but he's not going to heaven. There's a look on his face like he doesn't mind it. By his face I can tell he knows I'm looking at him, and he wants me to see something out ahead of him. He's pointing. His arm is extended toward some indistinct cluster of stars that looks to my eyes like nothing more than a tiny wheel in the night sky. In the dream the stars are so familiar to me as to be commonplace, but when I awake, I can't even remember the last time I looked at stars.

Triad: Fiction Excerpt

The Captain

“Water, I say. I haven’t had a thing to drink in hours.” The captain’s staff had plenty to report, most of it confusing. The captain was hoarse from giving orders and shouting exclamations of surprise. “Parker! Status.”

“Sir. Still no power from the main engines. Auxiliary is available at about twenty-five percent. Enough to keep us moving forward but every time we come within tracking distance of the alien craft again we’re back to no power. Weapons system unresponsive. Radios functional but satellite uplinks disabled.”

“Are we still receiving the strange radio noises?”

“Affirmative. Most likely the alien craft. The comm experts are saying it’s most like an animal noise in its tonal quality.

“How do they know that?”

“Sophisticated patterns, beyond the capacity of a machine to produce. Or more accurately an absence of pattern.

"Does it sound like bullshit to you?"

"Sir?"

"Could we be chasing a couple of gigantic explosive devices that only *seem* to be manned. And what kind of creatures could withstand a rapid dive of--how deep was it?"

"4000 meters, sir."

"4000 meters feet in less than thirty minutes?"

"Sir, I believe we're dealing with a creature navigating directly to a pre-selected location with a specific goal in mind."

The captain was as angry as he was curious. "Such as!"

"Such as they're looking for a source, either a certain raw material, such as manganese nodules, or a certain creature, such as..."

"A creature? And they're just going to dive into the ocean and start looking for it?"

"There is ample reason to believe the intruders have been to Earth before.”

“What reasons?” The captain asked in an unusually calm voice.

“The directness of all their movements so far, for one. And their adherence to the exact shipping lanes we ourselves only know from our GPS systems. They have patched into our information systems. For all we know they have monitored our radio communications. They somehow have the technology to navigate the dangers of our atmosphere and our oceans with no hesitations and no technical challenges, with a pair of relatively small vessels.