Long Eyes and Other Stories

by Jeff Carlson

  Sandifer took two points that might have been erased if Bolt's programs were still working, and losing that advantage also seemed to cost Bolt a psychological edge. Sandifer gained another point toward the end when the champ gave up on chasing a multiple ricochet.

  Bolt tried repeatedly to overpower him and caught him again in the ribs, a glancing blow, but Sandifer never returned the favor. He didn't want to hurt Bolt. He wanted the title.

  They called it the Blackout because Ramey's people turned off more control programs than necessary and knocked out the ExoReal broadcast of what many later said was the greatest upset of all time. The final score was nine-four and even before the final seconds ticked off, Sandifer could imagine the bulletins screaming "Sandman to Bolt: Goodnight!"

  Above and around him, people crowded against the glass, cheering and booing so loudly he actually heard a low grumble through the sound-proofing. For once, he waved back.

  Bolt had already turned to leave and Sandifer jogged across the box, feeling no pain until he forced his jaw to move.

  "Jake, wait."

  Tomorrow he'd be swollen like a tube squash and the Super Box was just a week away — yet win or lose it, he would always have this moment.

  Bolt paused at his gate, pushing his gogs up onto his forehead. His dark eyes were hard and angry.

  "Listen to me," Sandifer whispered. You tell them to stop. If I ever see any cheating again, I'll go public. I will."

  "This isn't the place to talk about—"

  Sandifer interrupted with a bloody grin. "If you think you can rope me in, forget it. A win that's handed to you isn't any kind of win."

  "You got lucky once."

  "I kicked your ass fair and square."

  "But you'll never get at the software again. And you'll just ruin the sport if you make any noise about it." Bolt's mouth curled into a smile, though his eyes stayed as emotionless as dirt. "We can make things sweet for you."

  "Not interested. Do it my way. Try anything stupid and it's all ready to go, Net, vid, ER. You'll be shit forever."

  Bolt turned away.

  Across the box, Sandifer's gate snapped up with a resounding clang and Ramey bounded out, whooping, "You did it! You did it, my boy!" She was so happy she was pretty.

  Bolt slapped at the controls of his own gate and dodged through. Sandifer almost went after him, thinking he’d better force a promise — but there would be time for that later. Ramey deserved his attention first.

  He laughed as she smothered him in an embrace. And when she kissed him wetly, he kissed back.

  The Sandman wanted always to be honest about his debts.

  END

  Afterword

  I invented the Lunar Smashball League after playing "whack ball" for hours and hours with Diana and our friends on the beaches near San Luis Obispo.

  The companies who sell the equipment for this sport call it "paddle ball" or "beach badminton." That was too tame for us. We called it whack ball because we liked to smack the guts out of the bright rubber ball. With effort, players can stand as far apart as fifty feet or, for a more violent and faster game, close to a circle only a few yards in diameter.

  Good times.

  We were young, fresh into dating each other, and thought nothing of disappearing for an entire day with a cooler full of sandwiches and iced tea. The bikinis were great, too.

  The game can played competitively or cooperatively, either trying to make your friends miss or trying to volley as long as possible. With pretty girls, cooperative is better. But crashing into the surf in competitive play was a different kind of fun.

  At the time, Artemis Magazine had just hit stores, a new, glossy publication loaded with hard sf. I slanted my story for a high tech setting, borrowed some elements from TV wrestling, stole the title outright from Metallica, introduced my older lover from college (don't tell my wife), and the Sandman was born.

  #

  These stories were a lot of fun to write. Some were more challenging than others. Always the process was gratifying, and I hope this collection struck a chord.

  I'll see you in the future.

  Jeff Carlson

  If you liked Long Eyes…

  LOOK FOR THE BEST-SELLING NOVELS BY JEFF CARLSON

  "I’m hooked."

  —Larry Niven, New York Times bestselling author of The Fate of Worlds

  Praise for The Frozen Sky

  Beneath The Ice

  "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."

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  "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

  The Next Breath You Take Will Kill You

  "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

  The Next Arms Race Has Begun

  "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

  An excerpt from The Frozen Sky

  1.

  Vonnie ran with her eyes shut, chasing the sound of her own boot steps. This channel in the rock was tight enough to reflect every noise back on itself, and she dodged through the space between each rattling echo.

  She knew the rock was laced with crevices and pits. She knew she might catch her leg or fall with every step.

  But she ran.

  She crashed one shoulder against the wall. Impact spun her sideways. She hit the ground hard. Sprawled on the rock, Vonnie pushed herself up and glanced back, forgetting the danger in this simple reflex.

  The bloody wet glint in her retinas was only a distraction, a useless blur of heads-up data she couldn’t read.

  Worse, h
er helmet was transmitting sporadically, its side mount and some internals crushed beyond saving. She’d rigged a terahertz pulse that obeyed on/off commands, but her sonar and the camera spot were dead to her, flickering at random — and the spotlight was like a torch in this cold.

  Vonnie clapped her glove over the gear block on her helmet, trying to muffle the beam. She wasn’t concerned about the noise of her boot steps. The entire moon groaned with seismic activity, shuddering and cracking, but heat was a give-away. Heat scarred the ice and rock. For her to look back was to increase the odds of leaving a trail.

  Stupid. Stupid.

  She’d never wanted to fight. Yes, the sunfish were predators. Their small bodies rippled with muscle, speed, and unrelenting aggression, but they were also beautiful in their way. They were fascinating and strange.

  Were they smarter than her?

  The sunfish had outmaneuvered her twice. More than anything, what Vonnie felt was regret. She could have done better. She should have waited to approach them instead of letting her pride make the decision.

  In some ways Alexis Vonderach was still a girl at thirty-six, single, too smart, too good with machines and math to need many friends. She was successful. She was confident. She fit the ESA psych profile to six decimal points.

  Now all that was gone. She was down to nerves and guesswork and whatever momentum she could hold onto.

  She lurched forward, pawing with one hand along the soft volcanic rock. With her helmet’s ears cranked to maximum gain, each rasping touch of her boots and gloves was a roar. Larger echoes hinted at a gap above her on her left. Could she climb up? Trying to listen for the opening, she turned her head.

  Her face struck a jagged outcropping in the wall. Startled, she jerked back. Then her hip banged against a different rock and she fell, safe inside her armor.

  Standing was a chore she’d done hundreds of times. She did it again. She kept moving.

  Vonnie didn’t think the sunfish could track the alloys of her suit, but they seemed like they were able to smell her footprints. Fresh impacts in the rock and ice left traces of dust and moisture in the air. There was no question that the sunfish were highly attuned to warmth. She’d killed nine of them in a ravine and covered her escape with an excavation charge, losing herself behind the fire and smoke… and they’d followed her easily.

  What if she could use that somehow? She might be able to lead them into a trap.

  Vonnie was no soldier. She had never trained for violence or even imagined it, except maybe at a few faculty budget meetings. That was an odd flicker of memory. Vonnie clung to it because it was clean and bright. She would have given anything to return to her old life, the frustrations and rewards of teaching, her classroom, and her tidy desk.

  She fell once more, off-balance with her hand against her head. A heap of rubble had caught her boots and shins. She scrabbled over what appeared to be a cave-in. The noises she made were loud, clattering booms — but the echoes stretched at least ten meters above her, defining a tall chasm.

  I can pin them here, she thought.

  If she burned the rock and left a false trail, she could drop the rest of the broken wall on them when they passed. Then they would give up. Didn’t they have to give up? After the bloodbath in the ravine, she’d killed two more in the ice, and others had been wounded. Could the sunfish really keep soaking up casualties like that?

  Vonnie could only guess at their psychology. Although she was blind, she knew of the existence of light. Although she was alone, she believed someone would find her.

  She thought the history of this race was without hope. The sunfish had a phenomenal will to live, but the concept of hope required a sense of future. It required the idea of somewhere to go.

  The sunfish had never imagined the stars, much less reached up to escape this black, fractured world.

  This damned world.

  No less than four Earth agencies had landed mecha on the surface to strip its resources. Then they’d sent a joint team in the name of science, handpicking three experts from China, America, and Europe — and Bauman and Lam had both died before First Contact, crushed in a rock swell. Would it have made any difference?

  The question was too big for her. That the sunfish existed at all was a shock. Humanity had long since found Mars and Venus stillborn and barren. After more than a century and a half, the SETI radioscopes hadn’t detected any hint of another thinking race within a hundred and fifty lightyears of Earth.

  Looking so far away was like a bad joke. The sunfish had been inside the solar system for millennia, a neighbor and a counterpart. It should have been the luckiest miracle. It should have been like coming home, but that had been Vonnie’s worst mistake: to think of the sunfish as similar to human beings. They were a species that seemed to lack fear or even hesitation, which might be exactly why her trap would work.

  She decided to risk it. She was exhausted and hurt. If she stopped running, she would have time to attempt repairs and regain the advantage.

  I hope they don’t come, she thought.

  But she found a small shelf in the cliff above the rock slide, then settled in to kill more of them.

  2.

  Jupiter’s sixth moon was an ocean, a deep, complete sphere too far from the sun to exist as liquid on its surface — not at temperatures of -162° Celsius. Europa was cocooned in ice. The solid crust ran as thick as twenty kilometers in some regions, which meant that for all intents and purposes, it enveloped Europa like a single continent.

  Human beings first walked the ice in 2094, and flybys and probes had buzzed this distant white orb since 1979. Europa was an interesting place.

  For one thing, it was as large as Earth’s moon — nearly as large as Mercury — which meant it could have been a planet in its own right if it orbited the sun instead of Jupiter. It also had a unique if extremely thin oxygen atmosphere caused by the disassociation of molecules from its surface. It was water ice.

  It was a natural fuel depot for fusion ships.

  Before the end of the twenty-first century, the investment of fifty mecha and two dozen more in spare parts was well worth an endless supply of deuterium at the edge of human civilization. The diggers and the processing stations were fusion-powered, too. So were the tankers parked in orbit.

  Spacecraft came next, some with crews, some piloted by robots, and eighteen years passed.

  That quiet period might have been much longer. The mecha were on the equator, where it was easiest for the tankers to hold position above them without constantly burning fuel, fighting Jupiter’s gravity and the tug of other moons — but Jupiter’s mass created other conflicts.

  Deep inside Europa, its rocky core flexed, generating heat and volcanic activity. The ocean rolled with murderous tides. On the surface, the ice suffered its own turmoil, creating different environments such as "canyons," "melts," "domes," and "chaos terrain." Especially on the equator, the ice bulged and sank and turned over on itself.

  Only the smoother, so-called "plains" were deemed safe by the men and women who guided the mecha by remote telepresence. Looking ahead, they sent rovers in all directions, surveying, sampling.

  At the southern pole was a smooth area that covered nearly thirty square kilometers.

  Many rovers went there.

  3.

  Vonnie shivered, an intensely ugly sensation inside her suit. She’d locked the joints and torso to become a statue, preventing herself from causing any movement whatsoever, and yet inside it she was skin and muscle.

  The feel of her body against this shell was repulsive. She squirmed again and again, trying to shrink away from it, which was impossible.

  The rut in her thinking wasn’t much better. She wished Choh Lam hadn’t tried to… She wished somehow she’d saved the rest of her crew. Lam understood so much so fast, he might have already found a way out, a way up.

  She’d cobbled together a ghost using his mem files, but she couldn’t give it enough capacity to correct its flaws. In
order to expand the ghost’s abilities, she would need to shut down her ears or the override she’d programmed into her heat exchanger, each a different kind of death. If she couldn’t hear, she would be utterly lost. And if her suit exuded body heat instead of storing it, her ambush would fail.

  It would be better to forget Lam. She thought she should erase him, but even at three-quarters logic he was useful. He’d suggested a tranquilizer and Vonnie had popped one tab, which slowed her down enough to feel clear again. Clear and cold. She shouldn’t be cold, sweating inside her hard shell, but the waiting was like its own labyrinth of ice — the waiting and the listening and the deep bruises in her face.

  She didn’t care how sophisticated the medical systems were supposed to be. On some level, her body knew it was hurt, even numbed and shot full of don’t-worry.

  Her head had a dozen reasons why she was safe, but her body knew the sunfish would come again. The lonely dark was alive. That truth no longer surprised her, and she strained her senses out into the dark, frozen spaces of the chasm below her.

  She was more afraid of missing the sunfish than of drawing in an attack. It was superstitious to imagine they could hear her thoughts, she knew that, but at the ravine they’d run straight to her hiding place despite three decoys. How did they keep zeroing in on her?

  She needed to learn if she was going to live.

  This rock shelf seemed defensible. There was nowhere to retreat but she only had one approach to cover. Overhead was a spongework of holes where she could dump her waste heat before leaving.