by Jeff Carlson
LONG EYES
and Other Stories
The Complete Collection
by Jeff Carlson
International bestselling author
of Plague Year and The Frozen Sky
"Long Eyes" Copyright ©2008 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Fast Forward 2 by Pyr Books
"Pressure" Copyright ©2003 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Strange Horizons
"Planet of the Sealies" Copyright ©2011 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
"Pattern Masters" Copyright ©2004 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Tales of the Unanticipated
"Caninus" Copyright ©2001 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in The Vampire’s Crypt
"Eighth-Acre Blues" Copyright 1990 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Kokopelli's Seed
"Exit" Copyright 1994 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in the MosCon 16 program guide
"Monsters" Copyright ©2002 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Space and Time Magazine
"Romance" Copyright ©2011 Jeff Carlson
First published in Long Eyes and Other Stories
"Nurture" Copyright ©2011 Jeff Carlson
First published in Long Eyes and Other Stories
"Gunfight at the Sugarloaf Pet Food & Taxidermy" Copyright ©2007 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
"A Lovely Little Christmas Fire" Copyright ©2009 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
"Snack Food" Copyright ©2004 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Tales of the Unanticipated
"Interrupt" Copyright ©2003 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Strange Horizons
"Writing About The Apocalypse" Copyright ©2010 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in io9
"Rose-Colored Demons" Copyright ©2011 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in SF Signal
"Damned When You Do" Copyright ©2011 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Welcome to the Greenhouse
"Meme" Copyright ©2004 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Fantastic Stories
"Enter Sandman" Copyright ©2002 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in Artemis Magazine
Cover art by Jacob Charles Dietz Copyright ©2011 Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
Interior illustrations for "Long Eyes", "Planet of the Sealies" and "Interrupt" by Karel Zeman from Pevnost Magazine. Copyright ©2010 and 2012. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
Interior illustration for "Pressure" by Billy Tackett Copyright ©2002 Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
Section Art Designs for "Monsters," "Gunfight," and "Interrupt" by Persia Walker and Donna Casey Copyright ©2011 Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
Art Design for "Julie Beauchain" by Tom Bevan Copyright ©2011 Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
Interior illustrations for "Gunfight" and "Christmas Fire" by Margus Lokk Copyright ©2010 Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
Interior illustration for "Meme" by Frank Wu Copyright ©2004 Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
Second Edition
eBook ISBN 978-1936460144
Jeff Carlson
[email protected]
www.jverse.com
Film / TV
Jim Ehrich
Rothman Brecher Kim Agency
9250 Wilshire Blvd., 4th Fl.
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
310-432-4629
Literary
Don Maass
Donald Maass Literary Agency
121 West 27th St., Ste. 801
New York, NY 10001
212-727-8383
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictiously. Any resemblence to actual events, locales, or persons either living or dead is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the author.
Copyright ©2011 Jeff Carlson
Other Books by
Jeff Carlson
Interrupt
(coming July 2013 from 47North)
The Frozen Sky
The Plague Year Trilogy
Plague Year
Plague War
Plague Zone
Advance praise for Long Eyes
"Striking."
—Locus Online
"Exciting."
—SR Revu
"Chilling and dangerous."
—HorrorAddicts.net
"An amazing collection."
—Sci-Guys.com
"Captivating. Long Eyes packs a lot of adventure and entertainment."
—BookBanter.net
Praise for The Frozen Sky
"I’m hooked."
—Larry Niven, New York Times bestselling author of The Fate of Worlds
"A first-rate adventure set in one of our solar system’s most fascinating places. Jeff Carlson is a fine storyteller, and this is his best book yet."
—Allen Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of the Coyote series
"Pulse pounding."
—Publishers Weekly
"Tense."
—Locus Magazine
"Nothing short of amazing."
—David Marusek, Sturgeon Award-winning author of The Wedding Album
"Believable and compelling. This is the perfect eerie setting for Carlson to flex his creative muscle."
—Bookworm Blues
Praise for Plague Year
"An epic of apocalyptic fiction: harrowing, heartfelt, and rock-hard realistic."
—James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of Bloodline
"Terrifying."
—Scott Sigler, New York Times bestselling author of Nocturnal
"Chilling and timely."
—RT Book Reviews
"Jeff Carlson packs riveting storytelling with a lot of fresh ideas."
—David Brin, New York Times bestselling author of Existence
"One of the best apocalyptic novels I’ve read. Part Michael Crichton, a little Stephen King, and a lot of good writing… Carlson makes it all seem plausible and thrilling."
—Quiet Earth (www.quietearth.us)
Praise for Plague War
Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award
"Compelling. His novels take readers to the precipice of disaster."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Intense."
—SF Reviews
"Excellent."
—SF Scope
"A breakneck ride through one of the deadliest and thrilling futures imagined in years. Jeff Carlson has the juice!"
—Sean Williams, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Carlson's nightmarish landscape presents a chilling albeit believable picture of a post-apocalyptic world. Strong, dynamic characters bring the story a conclusion you won't see coming.”
—RT Book Reviews
Praise for Plague Zone
"Gripping. An epic struggle among desperate nations equipped with nano weapons."
—Jack McDevitt, Nebula Award-winning author of Firebird
"A high-octane thriller at the core — slick, sharp, and utterly compelling."
—Steven Savile, international bestselling author of Silver
>
"I can’t wait for the movie."
—Sacramento News & Review
"This installment opens with a jolt. If you love dark SF, you can’t go wrong with Carlson’s great Plague trilogy."
—Apex Magazine
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
"Long Eyes"
"Pressure"
"Planet of the Sealies"
"Pattern Masters"
"Caninus"
"Eighth-Acre Blues"
"Exit"
"Monsters"
"Romance"
"Nurture"
"Gunfight at the Sugarloaf Pet Food & Taxidermy"
"A Lovely Little Christmas Fire"
"Snack Food"
"Interrupt"
"Writing About The Apocalypse"
"Rose-Colored Demons"
"Damned When You Do"
"Meme"
"Enter Sandman"
More From Jeff Carlson
About The Author and The Artists
Raccoons Go Here
For Ben Metzler
who has great vision of his own
INTRODUCTION
This is the book nobody wanted me to publish — nobody except the fans.
These days, corporate New York has zero interest in short fiction collections except from the most successful authors. I’m merely successful, not a major brand name, so this book has been a long time in the making.
I’m even more excited about it because of the wait.
Not too long ago, short fiction collections were a staple of science fiction and fantasy. Growing up, I tore through ‘em like a dingo feeds on human babies. Each collection served up a juicy pile of ideas, never lingering, always moving, banging on your brain like a bell. John Varley. Joe Haldeman. Heinlein. Asimov.
I’m fourth generation sf. My great-grandmother built her library around Frank L. Baum’s Oz series, the original fantasy epic. She passed those beautiful hardcover editions to her son, my grandfather, who kept them alongside "Doc" E.E. Smith novels such as Lensmen and The Galactic Patrol, which were the cutting edge in his own time.
Later, when I was a boy, my grandfather introduced me to the world’s first media tie-ins like Han Solo’s Revenge and Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye. This was not a man who sneered at popular good fun. He hooked me with Star Wars books, then fed my new addiction with the classics.
At the same time, my father was bringing home doorstoppers like The Hobbit and Clan Of The Cave Bear, which, yes, reads very much like alternate history.
This was mind-croggling stuff for a young boy. Obviously it warped me badly. Look at me now!
"Long Eyes" includes all of my short fiction from my earliest sales to several appearances in the top venues in the field.
If a novel is a loaded rifle, a short story is a single bullet. It needs to hit its target perfectly. As a writer, you love ‘em and leave ‘em. That’s a very different experience than sinking fourteen months into a novel, but it’s also the sweet taste of freedom. Running from idea to idea is a pleasure.
These stories feature aliens, clones, diseases, and disasters, but you’ll also find a bit of the supernatural and the psychotic. Following each story, I’ve also included an afterword discussing each story’s circumstances or inspiration.
It’s a tasty stew. I hope it makes your head explode.
#
Now onto the title story…
Jeff Carlson
LONG EYES
The ship turned to investigate and Clara tried to override, not because she wasn't curious but because she was still Homo sapiens in every way that mattered. It frightened her to lose control. But the men and women who'd agreed to invest in her had also invested in the top intelligence designers, and the central computer would not relinquish its orders.
Clara was bound deeply to the ship, so deeply that in one sense she was only another part of it, a human-shaped component in a cradle of gel and splice-wire. The complex nerves of her forearms and vertebrae were joined to plastic, metal, and glassware. She felt and influenced all systems directly — all except this one separate mind.
Their battle was quiet and careful until Clara determined that the central computer was most vulnerable during the corrective burns. The nav program was a doorway between them, and she tried to shut it down. She tried to make it run long. No luck. The cool orange K-star was just too close for the ship to ignore, and even Clara stared in enchantment as they approached the shadows of this system’s comet cloud.
Maybe too soon, she stopped fighting and joined her skills with the ship. Dodging their way in through the outer system would be weeks of rapid math. It became a new contest and the adrenaline was good, but Clara still added a dirty word to the ship's reports when it cast a tightbeam back toward home.
#
The dark and the cold were her friends. More than anything Clara liked to be able to see, so light and atmosphere were only complications — light because it blinded her telescopes, air because it distorted. Before her third nameday, she’d also realized that living in one place had limits. She preferred to drift. She was good at it. She was rich for it.
She was a failed experiment, a parentless child of the state, grown ex utero, originally gene-crafted to be an asteroid mining dock controller, stacking ore and fuel pods in complex micro orbits, guiding slowboats in and out of the cluster. At first that had been a challenge, then only repetitive.
She’d left home six hundred years ago — six hundred years by herself, jetting away from known space, peering ahead and to all sides with fantastic eyes. The administration had been generous. They regretted what they'd made of her. They gave her the ram ship she wanted. Of course, the vast reach of macroscopes made any explorer almost irrelevant, except that in time she would gain new angles and the chance, here and there, for closer analysis. Her freedom came with a price. They'd programmed the central computer to report on a set list of potentially habitable systems first, all very similar G- and K-class stars. Clara didn't mind. She was doing exactly what she wanted, feeding imagery to her weird brain, as big as everything within range of her long eyes.
She was never lonely. If she needed noise, if she wanted other thoughts, there was always a signal to tap. Almost always. And in those rare zones where communications were sunk or blocked, bent by a sun or degraded by dust, the computer had millions of hours of radio traffic on record.
At a fraction of lightspeed, Clara wouldn't truly be outside the sphere of human activity for centuries to come. So she slept. She slept a lot. The ship went through its self-repairs and it did its work on her as well — and each time she woke, she was met by a new feast of colors and living shapes, the clockwork of stars all pulling on each other, halos of rock and ice. She wanted to go on forever. But she had also come to realize, too late, that she shouldn’t have been so trusting.
#
They were 17.7 light-years beyond the nearest recorded colony. Clara could not sell information for food or hardware or sex. She could get software patches, however, which could be the keys to reprogram the computer core. Keys to freedom.
She had one more chance to fight as the ship moved inward past a gas super giant, readjusting its course again, but Clara didn’t struggle. She put her energy into maps and sims instead. Unfortunately, the remainder of this system was just two inner planets and some groupings of comets falling through and back. There was nothing valuable except the second planet, a brown-and-black rock with a crude atmosphere.
Recalibrating her eyes for close-in analysis was both painful and a delight. Physically painful. Extreme adjustments took sweat and discomfort, but her reward was that she became this world's demigod, aware of every dust mote, able to gauge the poetry of its winds and its lopsided mantle and the hot echoing pockets within its surface.
The oxygen content the ship had locked onto was barely a wisp. Clara didn't wonder that it had been detected at all—her eyes were that p
owerful — but was it exploitable? Could human beings ever walk on this planet? If she drew down ten thousand comet impacts before she left, slamming more water into the environment, could she kick-start a terraforming effort that might almost become livable before anyone else arrived?
There was a lot of money and clout to be had just in the possibility, and something else she hadn't thought she wanted. Redemption. Clara was happy with the choices she had made, but she was still a woman who'd turned her back on everyone she knew.
This would be a way to reconnect. In a sense, it was almost a way to bring them with her. She hadn't thought that idea would feel so good, and she wasn't sure she liked it. She added a whole string of curse words to the ship's next tightbeam, but she was laughing, too.
"First of all," she said, "you can name it after me."
#
Clara ran a hundred orbits and mostly learned only new questions. The planet's surface was barren. Mold, lichen, and weeds grew here and there, but not enough to explain the fragile, swirling atmosphere or the animal methane.
There was life, but where? Clara sounded the pockets in the mantle but was frustrated by their number. Even the obvious air leaks — the warm storms and bleeds from underground — were little help. All of these were volcanic gases. Twice she isolated vents that also held traces of biological material, but both paths back inward were an impossible maze of fractures and cave-ins.
#
Everywhere the mantle was breaking. This planet had a weak core and only three-quarters Earth gravity. It had bubbled. Along the equator, in fact, one clump of hollows ran six hundred kilometers wide.