Re-crossing the courtyard, he studied the numerous angled roofs high overhead, half expecting to see something up there staring back at him.
He made his way, deeply disturbed, through the building to the Academy’s bell tower and let himself in to its relative sanctuary. A few moments later he was tugging hard on the bell ropes, waking the town to the story he would fabricate for its startled people.
© 2014 by Adrian Cole.
Excerpted from The Shadow Academy by Adrian Cole.
Published by permission of the author and Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.
All rights reserved.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Cole was born in Devonport, Plymouth (UK) in July 1949. He has worked as a librarian, an administrator for the local Education Authority in Devon and as the Business Manager of a secondary college in Bideford, where he worked for twenty years before retiring with his lovely wife, Judith. The Coles have two children, now young adults, Sam and Katia. Much of Cole’s work—fantasy, SF, and horror—is influenced by his large collection of books, magazines and comics, not to mention all the movies and CDs. He has written more than twenty-five books and dozens of short stories.
NOVEL EXCERPT:
Eleanor
Jason Gurley
Prologue
1962
Eleanor sits in the breakfast nook and watches the rain fall. The tree that Hob and Agnes planted two summers ago bends sideways with the wind. Even from here Eleanor can see the earth around its base beginning to pucker. If the storm gets much worse, the tree won’t survive.
She can hear the rain lashing against the house with each gust of wind. Up above, the attic moans like a Coke bottle as the wind whistles through the rafters.
“No swimming today,” Eleanor says aloud.
She’s surprised to have spoken the words, but more surprised that they crossed her mind at all. She and Hob haven’t gone to the ocean since the accident, which was minor enough. A misstep on the island path, a twisted ankle. Normally that sort of thing would have kept her out of the water for a couple of days, no more.
But Eleanor had turned up pregnant again. And that, according to her doctor, made swimming in the ocean a no-no.
“And no throwing yourself off cliffs, either,” he advised, upon learning why Eleanor was swimming in the first place. “I’m surprised you’re still pregnant, to be quite honest. That kind of physical abuse can terminate a pregnancy in a heartbeat.”
Hob had babbled on the way home about having a son, but Eleanor barely heard him.
Pregnant.
Again.
As if Eleanor didn’t already feel that her life was being written by someone else’s hand.
She sips her tea now and sighs. She sighs an awful lot now, the air pushed out of her lungs by the weight of her thoughts. Dark, awful thoughts. A few nights before, she dreamed about a man who bothered her at the grocery store. He had been holding a clipboard and a pen, and instinctively she had tried to step past him. He’d said, “I’ll see you on the way out,” and let her pass, and she had forgotten about him. But he was there when she finished shopping, and this time as she tried to slide by, he said, “Vote for Eleanor,” and she stopped.
“Excuse me?” the dream version of herself asked.
“Eleanor,” the man repeated. “The town is voting on her issue.”
“What issue?” Eleanor asked.
“It’s simple,” the man said, folding back one of the pages on the clipboard and holding it up for her to see. There were two big words on the page: Yes and No. Below each word was a list of names, some scrawled illegibly, some in neat cursive. “Either Eleanor can start over, or Eleanor can stay in prison.”
“In prison?”
“Right,” the man said, without explaining further.
“I’m Eleanor,” Eleanor said.
“Oh!” the man said. “Well, then you definitely should consider voting. Right now it’s a tie. You’ll be the tiebreaker!”
“Isn’t voting a private affair? This looks like a petition to me.”
“Not at all,” the man said. “But bananas eat for free on Thursday afternoons.”
“What?” Eleanor asked.
“I said, you better hurry and vote, because I think you’re about to wake up.”
But she had woken from the dream before she’d had time to cast her vote. The dream has remained with her since, her brain working on the question of her vote—while she makes dinner for Hob and Agnes, while she washes dishes, while she sits in the bathtub, the deepest water she’s been in for months.
What vote would she have cast?
Eleanor rubs her belly idly as the storm worsens. She’s showing now—not much, but enough that strangers have begun complimenting her when she goes to town. She and Hob haven’t made love since they found out. She hasn’t been in the mood, and he’s been worried about hurting the baby, something she thought he’d figured out during her first pregnancy.
She’s grateful that this new baby seems to have distracted him from his worries, though.
At least one of them is excited.
• • • •
She slips out of the house before Hob or Agnes wake. The sky is dim but growing lighter. She sits behind the wheel of the Ford and stares up at the clouds, leaning forward to see them through the windshield. They’re ominous and dark, almost black. She wonders what the view from above the clouds is like. She thinks that it’s probably all blue skies and sunshine up there, the absolute opposite of life down here in Anchor Bend.
The rain pounds on the Ford like a bag of rocks in a tumble dryer. Eleanor drives slowly, both hands tight on the wheel. She rolls through town, the only thing moving for miles. None of the shops are yet open. There are no pedestrians on the sidewalks. Days like this feel a bit like the end of the world. Everything is still and murky and slow.
She drives for a little while, eventually leaving the heart of the little town behind. Like a magnet, she is drawn to the ocean. She parks the truck in the small lot beside the beach and kills the engine and turns off the wipers. Rain courses down the windshield in waves. She can see little blips and plops on the hood, one for every drop of rain that lands on the car. In the distance she can see the shape of Huffnagle, blurred by the rain until it’s only a cottony shadow.
Eleanor closes her eyes and lets out another long, weary sigh. She listens to the pounding rain on the roof. Hears the slap of it against the asphalt outside. The ocean has some life today, every wave a low roar as it breaks on the beach.
When she opens her eyes again, she has made up her mind. She leaves the keys in the ignition, opens the door, and steps out into the rain. In an instant, she is soaking wet, her nightgown and housecoat clinging to her swollen body.
There is a pickup truck parked at the opposite end of the small lot. The only other person in the world arrived at the beach while Eleanor’s eyes were closed. She can see the shape of a person inside, perhaps enjoying the weather. She doesn’t wave, doesn’t care.
The beach stones are black and wet and shiny. Eleanor crosses them slowly, but she isn’t worried about slipping and falling down. There are two sandpipers pattering around, dipping their beaks into the sand after each receding wave. The clouds in the distance are pulling apart like taffeta, black feathery tendrils separating from their bodies. More rain. Harder rain.
Eleanor walks to the edge of the beach and stands there a moment in her heavy wet housecoat. The waves are needle-sharp as they smack her ankles and feet. She closes her eyes again, hands deep in her pockets, and thinks of Hob and his pleasant smile and his broad shoulders and secrets and his carefully parted slick hair and his deep, sad, true eyes. She thinks of Agnes and her knotted hair and the wrinkle lines around her little dark eyes when she smiles and her cute small earlobes and her favorite song.
They’ll be all right, she knows.
Eleanor pulls her housecoat off, sleeve by sleeve. It grabs at her skin as if resisting, but she casts it onto the beach. She bends over and grasps the hem of her nightgown, the wet flannel squishy between her fingers. She gathers it into her fists, lifts it up and over her head. Naked, she faces the ocean calmly. The rain is bitingly cold, the wind worse.
Behind her she hears the muffled sound of a car door opening, and then a distant male voice shouts something.
She doesn’t answer or look back.
Eleanor steps into the ocean and strides forward, the water reaching her knees, then her hips. When she’s waded in waist deep, she spreads her arms wide behind her and lunges forward into the water, and she begins to swim, and swim, and swim.
© 2014 by Jason Gurley.
Excerpted from Eleanor by Jason Gurley.
Published by permission of the author.
All rights reserved.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jason Gurley is the author of The Man Who Ended the World, Deep Breath Hold Tight, and the bestselling novel Greatfall, among other books. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest, and can be found at jasongurley.com.
NONFICTION
INTERVIEW: KARL SCHROEDER
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Karl Schroeder is one of the best authors in the current generation of hard science fiction writers. He’s also an accomplished futurist who works in strategic foresight for the design firm Idea Couture. His latest novel, Lockstep, presents a fresh take on the idea of human civilization in space.
This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and guests discuss various geeky topics.
Your new novel is called Lockstep, and it has one of the most interesting science fictional premises I’ve heard in a long time, this idea of the Locksteps. I want to get to that in just a second, but first I want to talk about the setting of the book. This book is set in interstellar space, in several light years’ worth of space between our solar system and Alpha Centauri. I think most people would imagine that there’s not much there, but in your novel there’s a lot there, so tell us about that.
A couple years ago I stumbled across an astronomy paper, I believe it was called “Nomads of the Galaxy,” talking about observations that had been made using microlensing techniques, which is basically looking at stars winking because something passed in front of them, very, very distant in the galaxy. But what the people doing the study were finding was that the number of winks was extremely high, and what this implied was that there could be up to 100,000 free-floating planets for every star in the galaxy, and by free-floating I mean interstellar wanderers, nomads, orphan worlds. Most of them would be really tiny, like the size of Pluto or even much smaller, but a few would be Earth-sized or even bigger, and if every star in the galaxy has this retinue of dark angels following it around then, wow, that was a fantastic setting, and I had to do something with it.
Why don’t you tell us what kind of technologies it would take for people to live on these small planets out in the middle of interstellar space? How would we get our food, water, energy, and so on?
This is where it gets fun, because when you first think of colonizing Pluto or places beyond that it seems like a bleak and horrible thing to do. You’re going basically to the back of beyond, further than the back of beyond, to a place where our sun is no brighter than any other star in the sky, and it’s absolute zero outside. You’re on a tiny iceball which is too big to be called a comet but too small to be called a planet. What are you going to do there? How are you possibly going to be able to live? The solution, and it’s a kind of solution that actually has evolved here on Earth—if you ever get the chance to go up to the high arctic, to the tundra, you’ll find in the summer these tiny little arctic wildflowers which look so incredibly delicate, but they’ve survived in that incredibly harsh environment for millions of years. We had a little bit of a taste of their winter this winter in North America. It’s amazing that they could do it, but they use a very simple and straightforward trick: They’re dormant most of the time. There’s a very brief arctic summer, and during that brief flowering these plants and the animals that live off of them undergo a burst of growth, and they exploit that energy as quickly as they can, as much as they can, and then they go dormant again. I took that as a great model to follow and designed the civilization of the Locksteps around it.
The civilization of the Locksteps relies very heavily on going dormant in these hibernation beds that you call cicada beds. Why don’t you tell us about that technology, and why are they called cicada beds?
First of all, I’d kind of like to say why I would go this crazy route rather than just writing a book in which people skip between stars faster than light, and the reason is because Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, these are great stories—they only suffer from one problem. They’re all impossible. As far as we know, Einstein discovered a rule that’s ironclad across the cosmos: You cannot travel faster than light. If you cannot travel faster than light, then all of these stories become fantasies. People have tried to figure out way to accelerate starships up to close to light speed, and you’d basically have to take enough energy to blow up a planet to do something like that. It’s crazy. It’s absolutely ridiculous to even try. But there is another way and it involves hibernation. It involves cold sleep, and it turns out that is, although we don’t know how to do it right now, a much easier problem to solve than the problem of faster-than-light travel or even near-light-speed travel. There might, in the end, be a way to travel faster than light, but there’s probably only one way. But there’s probably many different routes to achieving hibernation technology that would actually work.
So why’d you decide to call them cicada beds?
Because the civilization itself works a lot like cicadas do. They as a species have evolved to all wake simultaneously, essentially, for their brief mating period. This is because any male who wakes outside of the cycle, well, he simply won’t find a mate, so they’ve—over however long, millions of years maybe—they’ve developed a system whereby they wake and sleep in lockstep. The cicadas all come alive at the same time, they have this brief flowering like those arctic flowers I mentioned, and then the next generation comes along.
The cicada beds in Lockstep: They’re literally beds. They’re the same beds you sleep on any other night, but on one night out of every month they quietly, after you’ve gone to sleep, set you into deep, deep hibernation, and eventually most of the Lockstep world stays freezing solid, and you stay that way for thirty years, and so does everyone else. The entire civilization goes dormant for thirty years, and then wakes for a month, and goes to sleep for thirty years, and wakes for a month, which is, of course, insane. There’s no rational reason why you would do something like that on a place like Earth, but when you get out between the stars to these nomad worlds, all of a sudden it becomes not just a viable way to live, but perhaps the best way to live, because in that brief flowering you can use up all the resources that your robots and mechanized industries have been slowly gathering and building over the last thirty years. You can have a party for a month, go to sleep, wake up the next day, and party for another month, and it doesn’t matter the size of the world you’re on. The smallest comet and the largest planet can participate equally in this civilization, but even better, you can travel. You can go to any one of thousands of worlds. If it takes you thirty years to get there at some slow sub-light speed, it doesn’t matter, because it feels to you and to everyone else as if it’s overnight.
The beauty of this system is that it actually mig
ht be possible, unlike any of the other space operas out there that require some form of faster-than-light travel or handwaving technology that magically makes the distances of interstellar space go away. This model takes them into account. It requires one thing, hibernation technology way beyond what we’ve got right now, but what it requires isn’t impossible.
I thought it was interesting, speaking of faster-than-light travel, you say that “I misjudged the fervor with which people cling to the belief that the light speed limit will just somehow magically and handwavingly get engineered around.” What have been some of the most vociferous kinds of response like that that you’ve gotten?
Outrage, really. “No, of course we can do this. Of course faster-than-light travel will be invented, and shame on you for saying that it won’t.” It’s all very well to say that it could be invented, and in fact, I will freely admit that we don’t know that it can’t be invented. You can’t prove that faster-than-light travel will never be invented, but you also can’t prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. There’s all kinds of things out there that you can’t prove don’t exist, but that really does us no good, and you can spend the rest of your life dreaming and wishing that faster-than-light travel could be invented, and I think you should certainly try to find out whether it can be. Or you can actually get the same result as you would get from faster than light travel by other means.
What are some of the potential drawbacks or practical problems with the lockstep system that you’ve heard from readers, and what would be your responses to those?
First of all, it’s crazy because the end result as the hero of the novel, Toby, finds out is that forty years of lifespan for a person living in the lockstep encompasses 14,000 years in real time, and on the lit worlds, places like Earth and Mars, civilizations rise and fall; transhuman entities come into being; ripples through the universe devouring everything in sight; there are wars; there are collapses; and there are rebirths, and all the while, out in the darkness, the locksteps are just chugging slowly forward. “Why would you go to these places rather than go to the exciting worlds where things are happening?” is one objection. The answer to that is that you can travel. You can travel to thousands and thousands of different worlds if you live in the lockstep. If you don’t live in the lockstep and you live in real time, there’s probably ten planets that you might be able to visit in your lifetime, or if you do travel between the stars, it’s a one-way journey, either for you or for the people that you leave behind who will be dead before you get home.
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50 Page 22