The Last Science Fiction Writer

by Allen Steele

  While The Last Science Fiction Writer consists of stories I wrote during a relatively short period of time, in some ways it also represents a cross-section of my career thus far. “Moreau2” and “High Roller” are later entries in the Near-Space series not included in Sex and Violence in Zero-G; “The War of Dogs and Boids” is a stand-alone episode of the Coyote cycle. “Take Me Back To Old Tennessee” and “Hail to the Chief” are related to one another; “An Incident of the Luncheon of the Boating Party” shares the same background as an earlier story, “…Where Angels Fear to Tread” (along with its novel-length expansion, Chronospace). “World Without End, Amen” is the latest in a loosely-linked series that includes “Agape Among The Robots” and “Jake and the Enemy” (both in my previous collection, American Beauty) while continuing the same thematic concerns of my novel The Jericho Iteration.

  Other stories stand on their own. “Escape From Earth” was originally intended to be a young-adult novel until Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois invited me to contribute a novella to an anthology of YA science fiction. “The Teb Hunter” is straight-out satire, a comment on hunters and hunting; “The Last Science Fiction Writer” is much the same, although this time the target is science fiction itself, in particular some of its beloved and well-worn tropes.

  —Allen Steele

  The Last Science Fiction Writer Copyright © 2008

  by Allen Steele. All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket Copyright © 2008 by Bob Eggleton

  All rights reserved.

  Interior design Copyright © 2008 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-152-1

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: A Space Cadet Turns Fifty

  Escape From Earth

  The War of Dogs and Boids

  An Incident at the Luncheon of the Boating Party

  The Teb Hunter

  Moreau2

  High Roller

  World Without End, Amen

  Take Me Back To Old Tennessee

  Hail to the Chief

  The Last Science Fiction Writer

  INTRODUCTION:

  A SPACE CADET TURNS FIFTY

  This is my fifth collection of short fiction, but its title shouldn’t be taken literally: I don’t consider myself to be the last science fiction writer. Not only would that be narcissistic to the extreme, but untrue as well. Dozens of new authors have entered the field in the last several years, and no doubt that they will be followed by even more. So it’ll be a long time before the last science fiction writer appears on the scene…if ever.

  On the other hand, I’ve come to realize that I’m no longer the new kid on the block. It doesn’t seem so long ago that my first story was published, but the fact remains that nearly two decades have passed since “Live From The Mars Hotel” appeared in the mid-December 1988 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Considering that we’re close to the end of the first decade of the 21st century, this means most of my work (so far, at least) was published in the last century.

  Meanwhile, the author himself is getting long in the tooth. I didn’t have much trouble turning forty; fifty, though, is another matter entirely. It’s one thing to find the first grey hairs in one’s scalp, or get invitations from the AARP in the mail. With human longevity on the rise, it’s lately been said that fifty is the new forty. However, I’ve had two writers, both in their 30’s, recently tell me that they were reading my stuff when they were in college. This came as a shock—have I really been around so long that I’m on the verge of becoming a senior citizen in the field?

  Now that I’m turning fifty, I find that I’m writing less short fiction than I used to. One reason is that my work has become longer and more complex. The Coyote series, originally conceived to a single book, has become a trilogy that, in turn, has spawned two spin-off novels; a sixth volume in the cycle is a distinct possibility, and other novels beg to be written as well. That doesn’t leave much time for short fiction, however much I enjoy writing it.

  So this collection may be my last, at least for some time to come. However, while it consists of stories I wrote during a relatively short period of time, in some ways it also represents a cross-section of my career thus far. “Moreau2” and “High Roller” are later entries in the Near-Space series not included in Sex and Violence in Zero-G; “The War of Dogs and Boids” is a stand-alone episode of the Coyote cycle. “Take Me Back To Old Tennessee” and “Hail to the Chief” are related to one another; “An Incident of the Luncheon of the Boating Party” shares the same background as an earlier story, “‘…Where Angels Fear to Tread’” (along with its novel-length expansion, Chronospace). “World Without End, Amen” is the latest in a loosely-linked series that includes “Agape Among The Robots” and “Jake and the Enemy” (both in my previous collection, American Beauty) while continuing the same thematic concerns of my novel The Jericho Iteration.

  Other stories stand on their own. “Escape From Earth” was originally intended to be a young-adult novel until Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois invited me to contribute a novella to an anthology of YA science fiction. “The Teb Hunter” is straight-out satire, a comment on hunters and hunting; “The Last Science Fiction Writer” is much the same, although this time the target is science fiction itself, in particular some of its beloved and well-worn tropes.

  This is also the twentieth book I’ve published since 1988 (not counting two novellas published as hardcover chapbooks). Twenty books in twenty years: not a bad track record for an aging space cadet. And while I’m not planning to retire any time soon, nonetheless it represents a milestone of sorts. To my long-time readers, my thanks for sticking around for so long. I hope you enjoy the show.

  —Whately, Massachusetts;

  June, 2007

  ESCAPE FROM EARTH

  I always wanted to be an astronaut.

  I don’t remember when the space bug first bit me. Maybe it was when I was six years ago, and my dad took me to my first science fiction movie. It was the latest Star Trek flick, and maybe not one of the best—Steve, my older brother, fell asleep halfway through it—but when you’re a little kid, it’s the coolest thing in the world to sit in the Bellingham Theatre, scarfing down popcorn and Milk Duds while watching the Enterprise gang take on the Borg. It’s also one of my favorite memories of my father, so that may have something to do with it.

  Or perhaps it was when Mr. Morton moved away. Mr. Morton wasn’t well-liked in our neighborhood; he drank a lot, which was why his wife left him, and once he called the cops on Steve and me when he caught us skate-boarding in his driveway. So when the Narragansett Point nuclear power plant shut down and he—along with a few hundred other people who’d worked there—was forced to look elsewhere for a job, no one was sad to see him go. Mr. Morton packed as much as he could into a U-Haul trailer, and the rest was left on the street for Goodwill to pick up. His tail-lights had barely vanished when everyone on the block came over to see what they could scavenge.

  Amid the battered Wal-Mart furniture and crusty cookware, I found a cardboard box of books, and among all those dog-eared paperbacks I discovered two that interested me: A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin, and Rocket Boys: A Memoir, by Homer H. Hickam, Jr. I took them home, and read and re-read them so many times that the pages began to fall out. I was twelve years ago old by then, and those two books whetted my appetite for space. Mr. Morton may have been a nasty old coot, but he inadvertently did one good deed bef
ore he split town.

  But what really put the lock on things was the first time I saw the space station. My eighth-grade science teacher at Ethan Allen Middle School, Mr. Ciccotelli, was trying to get the class interested in space, so shortly after the first components of the International Space Station were assembled in Earth orbit, he checked the NASA web site and found when the ISS could be seen from southern Vermont. He told us when and where it would appear in the evening sky, then as a homework assignment told us to watch for it, and come to class tomorrow ready to discuss what we’d seen.

  So my best friend, Ted Markey, and I got together in my back yard after dinner. The night was cold, with the first snow of the year already on the ground. We huddled within our parkas and stamped our feet to keep warm; through the kitchen window I could see Mom making some hot chocolate for us. We used my Boy Scout compass to get our bearings, and Ted’s father had loaned him a pair of binoculars, but for a long time we didn’t see anything. I was almost ready to give up when, just as Mr. Ciccotelli predicted, a bright spot of light rose from the northwest.

  At first, we thought it was just an A-10 Thunderbolt from Barnes Air National Guard Base down in Massachusetts, perhaps on a night training mission. Dad was in the National Guard, so I’d been to Barnes a couple of times, and we were used to seeing their Warthog squadron over Bellingham. Yet as the light came over the bare branches of the willow tree at the edge of our property, I noticed that it didn’t make the dull drone the way Warthogs usually do. It sailed directly above us, moving too fast for Ted to get a fix on it with his binoculars, yet for a brief instant it looked like a tiny t moving across the starry sky.

  I suddenly realized that there were men aboard that tiling, and at that very same moment they were probably looking down at us. In that instant, I wanted to be there. Out in space, floating weightless within a space station, gazing upon Earth from hundreds of miles. I didn’t say that to Ted or Mr. Ciccotelli, and especially not to Steve, who had all the imagination of a cucumber, because I thought it would have sounded stupid, but that was when I knew what I was going to do when I grew up.

  Some kids want to be pro athletes. They idolize the Red Sox or the Patriots or the Bruins, and spend their afternoons playing baseball or football or ice hockey. In my town, there’s a lot of farm kids who follow the family trade, so they join 4H and bring the roosters, pigs, and calves they’ve raised to the state fair in hopes of taking home a blue ribbon. Ted read a lot of comic books; he drew pictures of Spider-Man and the Teen Titans in his school notebooks, and dreamed of the day when he’d move to New York and go to work for Marvel or DC. And, of course, there’s guys like Steve, who never really figure out what they want to do, and so end up doing nothing.

  That night, I decided that I was going to be an astronaut.

  But sometimes you get what you want out of life, and sometimes you don’t. Maybe it was impossible for Eric Cosby from Bellingham, Vermont, to be an astronaut. A couple of years later, I was beginning to think so. By then my father had been killed in Iraq, my mother was working two jobs, my brother had become a poster child for DARE, and the night I stood out in my backyard and watched the space station fly over had become a fading memory.

  That was before I met the weird kids. After that, nothing would ever be the same again.

  It happened early one evening in late October. Just before sundown, that time of day when the sun is fading and the street lights are beginning to come on. I was hanging in front of Fat Boy’s Music Store on the corner of Main and Birch, wondering what I was going to do that Friday night.

  Fat Boy’s was a block from the Bellingham Youth Club, where I’d become accustomed to spending my free time until federal cutbacks for after-school programs caused them to shut their doors. One more thing I owe Uncle Sam, along with sending my dad to some hellhole called Falluja. The corner of Main and Birch wasn’t so bad, though. It was in the middle of downtown Bellingham, with the Bellingham Theatre just a half-block away. I missed the foosball and pool tables of the BYC, but Fat Boy’s had speakers above the door, and if you stood outside you could listen to new CDs. The guys who ran the store didn’t mind so long as you didn’t make a public nuisance of yourself, and that constituted blocking the door, leaving empty soda cans on the sidewalk, or doing anything that might attract the cops.

  Which amounted to doing anything above and beyond breathing, and that was why hanging out at Main and Birch wasn’t such a good idea. The leaf-peepers from New York and Connecticut had come up for the fall foliage, and the local constables didn’t want ruffians like me loitering on the streets of Ye Olde New England Towne. Once already a cop car had cruised by, with Officer Beauchamp—aka “Bo,” as he was not-so-fondly known—giving me the eye. If he’d stopped to ask what I was doing here, I would’ve told him I was waiting for Mom to pick me up.

  Mom was still at the factory, though, and after that she’d only have an hour or so before she started serving drinks at Buster’s Pub. Dinner was in the freezer: another microwave entrée, a choice between beef-this or chicken-that. I’d see her late tonight, if I stayed up long enough. And if I stayed up even later, I might catch the reappearance of Smokin’ Steve, Bellingham’s favorite convenience store clerk and part-time dope dealer.

  So ask me why I was propping up a wall on the street corner, watching what passed for rush hour in my town. I’m not sure I knew, either. I told myself that I was waiting for Ted to show up, and after that we’d grab a bite to eat and maybe catch whatever was showing at the theater—it looked like another horror flick about evil children with butcher knives—but the fact of the matter was that I was trying to avoid going home. The house seemed to have become empty now that Dad was gone, and every minute I spent there only reminded me how much I missed him.

  But it wasn’t just that. I was sixteen years old, and lately it had occurred to me that I might be stuck in Bellingham for rest of my life. Only a year ago, my dream had been to follow my heroes—Alan Shepard and John Glenn, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, John Young—and become the first man to set foot on Mars. Heck, I would’ve settled for a seat on a shuttle flight to deliver a satellite to orbit. But the only person who’d ever encouraged my ambitions was now six feet under, and no matter how many times I’d bicycled out to the cemetery to have a talk with him, he never answered back.

  Damn. If only Dad hadn’t re-upped with the National Guard. If he was still around, he’d…

  “Pardon me. Could you give us some directions?”

  Wrapped up in my thoughts, I jumped when a voice spoke beside me. Startled, I looked around, saw a guy…

  No. Not a quite a guy. Another teenager, about my own age, give or take a year or two. Average height, dark brown hair, sharp eyes. I’d never seen him before, but that didn’t mean anything. Like I said, a lot of tourists came through Bellingham in the fall.

  Nor was he alone. To his right was another kid…or at least I assumed he was a kid, because his face was young. But only once before I’d met a kid as big as he was, and although Josh Donnigen was the quarterback for the Bellingham Pilgrims, this dude would’ve smeared Josh all over the scrimmage line.

  Yet it was neither the kid who’d spoken nor the giant on his right who attracted my attention, but the girl between them. There were two or three gals at school who interested me; the best of the bunch was Pauline Coullete, who I’d known since the fifth grade, and whom I’d lately been trying to muster enough courage to ask out for a date. Yet this girl—petite and slender, with light brown hair and the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen—made Pauline look like she’d just finished shoveling out the barn.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Umm…” The kid hesitated. “It’s difficult to explain, but could you tell us…?”

  “We require guidance to the Narragansett Point Nuclear Power Station.” This from the big guy, in a voice was that surprisingly mild. “Topographical directions will suffice, but linear coordinates would also…” />
  “Be quiet, Alex.” The girl cast him a stern look, and Alex immediately shut up. Which I thought was strange. If Pauline had spoken to me the same way, I would’ve been embarrassed, yet this guy showed no trace of emotion. Didn’t even blink. Just continued to stare at me, like…

  “We’re trying to find the nuclear…I mean…” The first kid stammered as if English was a foreign language, even though his accent was American. “The Narragansett Point…”

  “You mean the nuke?” I asked.

  “The nuke, yes.” He exchanged a glance with the girl. “That’s what we…I mean, I…that is, we…” He squared his shoulders. “Can you tell us how to get there?”

  That’s when I noticed the way they were dressed…and I almost laughed out loud.

  Go to a flea market, or maybe a vintage clothing store. Select what you’re going to wear at random, relying on dumb luck to get the right size. That’s what they looked like they’d done. The kid who couldn’t speak plain English wore plaid bell-bottoms with a purple disco shirt under a Yankees field jacket. His pal sported a patchwork sweater with camouflage trousers that rose an inch too high above his ankles, revealing a pair of pointed-toe cowboy boots. The girl had the best sense of style, but even then, I’ve never met anyone who’d matched a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt with red pants and a faux-fur overcoat.

  Their outfits may have been appropriate for a Halloween party, or maybe a rave club in Boston, yet they were as out of place in a small town in Vermont as a clown costume in church. Maybe this was some sort of post-punk, post-grunge, post-whatever fashion statement, yet I had a distinct feeling that they were trying to dress like American teenagers, but couldn’t quite get it right.

  And I wasn’t the only one who noticed. An all-too-familiar police cruiser came to a stop at the traffic light, and I glanced over to see Officer Beauchamp checking us out. He saw me and I saw him, yet for once he was less interested in what I was doing than in my companions. The two guys didn’t notice him, but the girl did; she hastily looked away, yet I could tell that Bo made her nervous.