InterGalactic Medicine Show Awards Anthology, Vol. I

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  InterGalactic Awards Anthology Vol. I is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © August 2011, Hatrack River Enterprises

  All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

  Published by:

  Spotlight Publishing, Inc.

  P.O. Box 621

  Madison, NC 27025

  www.spotlight-publishing.com

  Formatted for electronic book readers by:

  E-QUALITY PRESS

  www.e-qualitypress.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission from the copyright owner, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  Cover art by Julie Dillon, www.juliedillonart.com

  Cover design by Scott J. Allen, www.webboulevard.com

  Art Credits

  “The Never Never Wizard of Apalachicola” by Julie Dillon

  First appeared in IGMS issue #20

  Copyright © August 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Wise Men” by Nick Greenwood

  First appeared in IGMS issue #20

  Copyright © December 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” by Nicole Cardiff

  First appeared in IGMS issue #17

  Copyright © June 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “The Vicksburg Dead” by Kevin Wasden

  First appeared in IGMS issue #20

  Copyright © December 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  Story Credits

  “Trinity County, CA” by Peter S. Beagle

  First appeared in IGMS issue #18

  Copyright © August 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” by Von Carr

  First appeared in IGMS issue #17

  Copyright © June 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived” by Keffy R. M. Kehrli

  First appeared in IGMS issue #19

  Copyright © October 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “The American” by Bruce Worden

  First appeared in IGMS issue #20

  Copyright © December 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Silent as Dust” by James Maxey

  First appeared in IGMS issue #7

  Copyright © January 2008, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Horus Ascending” by Aliette deBodard

  First appeared in IGMS issue #8

  Copyright © April 2008, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “End-of-the-World Pool” by Scott M. Roberts

  First appeared in IGMS issue #12

  Copyright © May 2009, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “A Heretic by Degrees” by Marie Brennan

  First appeared in IGMS issue #10

  Copyright © December 2008, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “The Never Never Wizard of Apalachicola” by Jason Sanford

  First appeared in IGMS issue #20

  Copyright © December 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Beautiful Winter” by Eugie Foster

  First appeared in IGMS issue #13

  Copyright © July 2009, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Blood & Water” by Alethea Kontis

  First appeared in IGMS issue #9

  Copyright © July 2008, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Mean-Spirited” by Edmund R. Schubert

  First appeared in IGMS issue #16

  Copyright © January 2010, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Robot Sorcerer” by Eric James Stone

  First appeared in IGMS issue #10

  Copyright © December 2008, Hatrack River Enterprises

  “Aim For The Stars” by Tom Pendergrass

  First appeared in IGMS issue #15

  Copyright © November 2009, Hatrack River Enterprises

  InterGalactic Awards

  Anthology Vol. I

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  Introduction by Peter S. Beagle

  Art Winners

  1st Place, Cover Art: Julie Dillon

  From the story “The Never Never Wizard of Apalachicola” by Jason Sanford

  1st Place, B&W Interior Art: Nick Greenwood

  From the story “Wise Men” by Orson Scott Card

  2nd Place, B&W Interior Art: Nicole Cardiff

  From the story “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” by Von Carr

  3rd Place, B&W Interior Art: Kevin Wasden

  From the story “The Vicksburg Dead” by Jens Rushing

  Story Winners

  1st Place: Trinity County, CA

  by Peter S. Beagle

  2nd Place: Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain

  by Von Carr

  3rd Place (tie): The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived

  by Keffy R. M. Kehrli

  3rd Place (tie): The American

  by Bruce Worden

  Additional Stories from

  InterGalactic Medicine Show:

  Silent as Dust by James Maxey

  Horus Ascending by Aliette de Bodard

  The End-of-the-World Pool by Scott M. Roberts

  A Heretic by Degrees by Marie Brennan

  The Never Never Wizard of Apalachicola by Jason Sanford

  Beautiful Winter by Eugie Foster

  Blood & Water Alethea Kontis

  Mean-Spirited by Edmund R. Schubert

  The Robot Sorcerer by Eric James Stone

  Aim for the Stars by Tom Pendergrass

  Introduction

  * * *

  by Peter S. Beagle

  Before 1996, the pieces of short fiction I published could have been counted on the working fingers of Django Reinhardt’s fire-crippled left hand. This came about largely because I thought of short stories and novelettes in much the same way I thought about poetry—one wrong word, one wrongly-chosen image or incident, and you’d blow the whole thing, however promising the initial premise might have been. Novels, on the other hand, I thought of as the idiot’s form: you could make every possible mistake of style, character or plain narration—my father’s old favorite, Theodore Dreiser, is a classic example—and still wind up beating your readers into submission with detail and passion, having your work made into movies, and winning a Nobel Prize, all of which Dreiser did. Obviously, not everyone can write a perfect novel, but I still give that goal better odds than writing a perfect story or poem. So—until forced into it by unexpected circumstances, most of which I’ve never regretted—I stuck to novels and stayed almost altogether away from stories.

  There’s more money in novels, of course; but there used to be money in short fiction as well, and not that long ago, either. As recently as the 1960s, there were a lot more magazines—any number of them, large and small, some printed on slick, pricey paper, some just this side of raw newsprint—all in search of new stories to publish. Nor was the market limited to tales by the legendary likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John O’Hara, to name three (O’Hara never haggled over prices: an editor, usually from the New Yorker, would come to his apartment one specific day out of the week, and find several manuscripts awaiting him, price tags attached, on a table in the hallway). There was plenty of room and reception for people few remember, such as Louis Bromfield, Conrad Aiken, Gertrude Atherton, A.B. Guthrie, Guy Gilpatric (author of the popular “Mr. Glencannon”
sea-and-Scotch stories), Ellen Gilchrist, Mary O’Hara, John Russell, David Walker, Conrad Richter, Paul Gallico, John P. Marquand. James Street. . . . Forgotten or not, most of them were solid professional storytellers—sometimes something more—and it was actually possible for magazines to pay quite large sums for their works. Meanwhile underpaid readers employed by movie companies prowled through scores of such pieces every week, searching for something that might provoke the crocodilian imagination of this or that Hollywood mogul. Writers certainly starved and suffered then, as they do now: but still there was a real chance, for commercial authors and bold radicals alike, to be heard.

  Magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers even found space to print what were called “short-shorts.” These were basically extended anecdotes, most often ending with a dark or ironic punch line. Fredric Brown, who also wrote novels and short stories of more regular length, was the absolute master in this field; in a practical sense, it died with him. Just as well, I suppose, though Lord Dunsany was also good at the form, in a different way. Saki would have been.

  There weren’t as many writing fellowships in those times as there are today, and no MFA programs at all. (Even in the 1950s, when I went to the University of Pittsburgh on a Scholastic Magazines scholarship, there were only three universities in the country offering degrees in creative writing.) The writers who couldn’t make the slicks—or never chose to make them—turned to the pulps and genre outlets, in many ways the ancestors of today’s online fantasy and science fiction magazines. Generally you were paid by the word, which sometimes led to a fair amount of padding for padding’s sake. Even so, the pulps and their offspring served as a true training ground in professionalism for mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald, writers of Westerns like Ernest Haycox, Jack Schaefer, Dorothy Johnson and Frank O’Rourke—and, of course, any number of classic science-fiction and fantasy writers such as Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Catherine L. Moore, Ray Bradbury. Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, C.M. Kornbluth, Algis Budrys, Robert Silverberg, Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Judith Merril, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell (he may be remembered mostly as an editor, but today they’re still remaking his story “Who Goes There?” under its better-known title, The Thing). As long as you could keep a story moving along swiftly and tautly, and paid at least a modicum of lip-service to the ostensible genre of the particular magazine, there was a surprising amount of subversive originality that one could get away with. But such things are harder than they look from the outside, and for every published short fiction writer there were thousands of people who tried to break in and failed.

  Which brings us back to the question of why anyone bothers to write short stories at all, considering how difficult they can be to bring off properly, and how little reward they usually bring in, even when you do get it right. Big slicks like the Post, Collier’s, Look, and their sisters are as gone as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Black Mask Detective; while the pay, when adjusted for changing times, is no better than it ever was, and quite likely worse. Yet the storytelling impulse remains, always. It’s a part of who we are that goes back to our beginnings, when people we wouldn’t necessarily recognize as people gathered around fires in the dark, trying to make sense of the world that fed and killed them. That need to tell a tale is both intrinsic and eternal, and if the stories you presently hold in your hand began their lives as pixels on a computer screen rather than being pounded into the page on some thundering typewriter, or declaimed from a rickety traveling stage, that fact makes them no less powerful, no less powerfully seductive, no less capable of holding you with their glittering eyes. Every one of them has a distinct reason for being the exact length it is; and each of them, in its own way, makes me both ashamed that I stayed away from the field for so long, and proud to be part of their company at last.

  First Place, Cover Art

  * * *

  From the story “The Never Never Wizard of Apalachicola”

  IGMS issue #20

  Art by Julie Dillon

  First Place, B&W Interior Art

  * * *

  From the story “Wise Men”

  IGMS issue #20

  Art by Nick Greenwood

  Second Place, B&W Interior Art

  * * *

  From the story “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain”

  IGMS issue #17

  Art by Nicole Cardiff

  Third Place, B&W Interior Art

  * * *

  From the story “The Vicksburg Dead”

  IGMS issue #20

  Art by Kevin Wasden

  Trinity County, CA:

  You’ll Want to Come Again, and We’ll Be Glad to See You!

  * * *

  By Peter S. Beagle

  “This stuff stinks,” Connie Laminack complained. She and Gruber were dressing for work in the yard’s cramped and makeshift locker room which, thanks to budget cuts, was also the building’s only functional toilet. To get to the dingy aluminum sink, she had to step around the urinal, then dodge under Gruber’s left arm as he forced it up into the sleeve of his bright yellow outer coverall.

  “You get used to it.”

  “No, I won’t. They let me use my Lancome in school. That smells human.”

  “And has an FPF rating that’s totally bogus,” Gruber said. “Anything you can buy retail is for posers and pet shop owners. Won’t cut it out here.”

  Laminack unscrewed the top from the plain white plastic jar on the shelf below the mirror, and squinted in disgust at the gray gloop inside. “I’m just saying. Gack.”

  Gruber smiled. Stuck with a newbie, you could still get some fun out of it. Sometimes. “Make sure you get it every damn place you can reach. Really rub it in. State only pays quarter disability if you come home Extra Crispy.”

  “Nice try, but some of us actually do read the HR paperwork we sign.”

  “Oh, right,” Gruber said. “College grad.” She gave him a hard look in the mirror, but dutifully started rubbing the D-schmear on her hands and arms anyway, then rolled up her pants legs to get at her calves.

  “Face, too. Especially your face, and an inch or two into the hairline. Helps with the helmet seal.”

  “Just saving the worst for last.”

  Gruber laughed wryly. “It’s all the worst.”

  “You’d be the one to know, wouldn’t you?”

  “Got that right, trainee.”

  By the time they headed out to the Heap he was throwing questions at her, per the standard training drill, but not enjoying it the way he usually did. For one thing, she’d actually done a good job with the D-schmear, even getting it up into her nostrils, which first-timers almost never did. For another, she seemed to truly know her shit. Book shit, to be sure, not the real world shit she was here to start learning . . . but Gruber was used to catching new kids in some tiny mistake, then pile-driving in to widen the gap, until they were panicked and stammering. Only Laminack wasn’t tripping up.

  It had begun to bug him. That, and the fact that she bounced. Like he needed perky to deal with, on top of everything else.

  He waved back to Manny Portola, the shift dispatcher, who always stood in the doorway to see the different county crews off. It was one of Manny’s pet superstitions, and in time it had become Gruber’s as well, though he told himself he was just keeping the old guy happy.

  Laminack waved to the dispatcher as well, which irritated Gruber, even though he knew it shouldn’t. He slapped the day-log clipboard against his leg.

  “Next! Name the three worst invasives in Trinity.”

  “Trick question.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “No,” she insisted. “Definitely. You didn’t define your terms.” Her bland smile didn’t change, but Gruber thought he heard a tiny flicker of anger. Maybe he was finally getting to her. “Are we talking plants or animals here? ‘Cause Yellow Star Thistle and Dalmatian Toadflax and Kamathweed are hella invasive, even
if the tourists do like the pretty yellow flowers. And if we are talking animals, not plants, do you want me to stick to the D’s, or do you want me to rattle off the three worst things that have ever crawled or flown or swum in here from somewhere they shouldn’t? Which I could. And what do you mean by ‘worst,’ anyway? Because for my money jet slugs are about as yucky as it gets, and there are a lot more of them up here now than there are China longs. So yeah, I call trick question.”

  Gruber definitely wasn’t ready for two weeks of this. “Nobody likes a show-off, Laminack.”

  “No, sir.”

  “We’re not County Animal Control, and we’re damn well not the State Department of Food and Agriculture or the California Invasive Plant Council. So what do you think I wanted to hear when I asked that question?”

 

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