Tag: novella

A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2021), is the second of his ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories,1 and takes place in an alternate world where America, after finding a crashed flying saucer in 1938, went on to develop superweapons that changed the course of WWII (and also allowed it to establish hegemony over the rest of the world: Russia was invaded after the war; Roosevelt is serving his seventh term as president).
The story starts with Aldstatt falling out of a “terraplane” and plummeting towards the surface before the story flashbacks to a point in time several days earlier. Here we see her at an American Embassy party in Istanbul, where the ambassador talks to her about the purpose of her visit:

“So, you’re the girl that talks to dead people,” the ambassador had said as I came into his office that morning.
I noticed he had one of those idiotic gold Roosevelt silhouette pins in his lapel. A badge of loyalty. They weren’t required, but I was beginning to see them crop up more and more among the sycophants of the diplomatic corps.
So, you’re a puffed-up, aging boy whose daddy was smart enough to grab up the saucer patents early, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I wasn’t feeling combative. I was feeling fragile and tired, struggling to fight off a cold caught on the transatlantic rocket flight.
[. . .]
“Sir, I’m a combat veteran of the Second World War and the Afterwar. I was in General Hedy Lamarr’s Technical Corps. I pilot the loops, if that’s what you mean.”
Maybe that would help him sort the word “girl” out of his speech.
He didn’t even blink.  p. 16

Before this meeting Aldstatt talks briefly to a Chief Inspector Refik Bayar, a well-connected Turkish secret policeman better known as “The Fisherman”, who offers a briefing on Dimitrios Makropoulos, the dead man whose memories she is going to read. Makropoulos supposedly knows (or knew) the location of a second crashed saucer, and the Americans urgently want to find it before any other country does to avoid destabilising the world order.
When Aldstatt later goes to the building that houses Makropoulos’s body and the loop machinery, she meets the Chief Inspector once more, and gets a briefing on the dead man’s life as a professional middleman and criminal who operated in the shadows:

“There is a drug smuggling ring in the mountains north of Thessaloniki run by a Greek named Dimitrios who is never caught. This is in 1937. Was it him? We believe so—but we cannot be sure. We don’t pick up his trail again with certainty until he is sighted by one of our agents at the Athene Palace hotel in Bucharest. There, we know it is him. Our Dimitrios. Now he’s playing the role of a Greek freighter captain, but what he is really involved in is selling Black Sea naval intelligence to the Nazis via their emissaries in Rumania. This is 1940. We have our eyes on him until 1942, when our services are”—he paused, considering his words—“compromised. We catch a glimpse, perhaps, of him again. The port town of Varna, in fascist Bulgaria. First mate of a salvage vessel. He approaches one of our double agents embedded with the Axis Bulgarian government with information he says will alter the course of the war. This is 1943. The course of the war, by then, is largely unalterable. It took you Americans a few years to crack any of the technology you found on that saucer that crashed in your Western desert, but by 1943, things were much more certain.”
Ashes, ashes, you all fall down, I thought. And Turkey wakes up from its semi-Fascist dreams and joins the winning team to make sure it gets a slot in the U.N. But what was Turkey up to before that?
“And then?”
“And then our double agent in Bulgaria is compromised. And shot.”
There was a long beat of silence, with only the seagulls screaming over the Golden Horn to fill it.  p. 22

When Aldstatt eventually dons the loop helmet, and enters the dead man’s memories, she initially sees him trying to sell the location of the saucer to the Germans in the middle of WWII, before seeing his childhood as a goatherd in the Greek mountains, and then as he floats in the sea after his ship is torpedoed.
After the session she tells Alvin, her OSS handler, that Makropoulos spoke directly to her—something unprecedented in any of the dead people she has read—and that he appears to be aware of what has happened to him.
The rest of the story sees Sylvia reliving more of Makropoulos’s memories (which eventually start deteriorate and become distorted by her presence) against a backdrop of external developments that, among other things, include an apparent schism at the top of the American government over the desirability of recovering the second saucer—as revealed to Aldstatt by a night time visitor in a antigravity suit. This latter character (spoiler), Eleanor Roosevelt, reappears later on.
The conclusion of the story not only manages to satisfyingly tie up all the various plot strands but also, after revealing one of Makropoulos’s formative experiences as a child, produces an unexpectedly touching ending.
This is a very impressive piece (probably one of the best I’ve read recently in Asimov’s) and one that provides a huge amount of immersive detail. Nearly every paragraph throws off descriptions and information about the characters, their behaviour, their physical location, the geopolitics of this world, and the geopolitics of our world. You end up with the impression that Nayler has taken all his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, Foreign Service officer, and Cultural Affairs officer—and his life time observations of the world and its inhabitants—and squeezed them all into one story.
This should be on the Hugo finalist ballot, but it probably won’t be.2
****+ (Very good to Excellent). 18,800 words.

1. The first published story of Ray Nayler’s ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ series is The Disintergration Loops (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2019). I suggest you read A Rocket for Dimitrios first.

2. This probably won’t be on the Hugo ballot because it appears in a print magazine and isn’t available free online. And because it is also up against the Tor novellas, which are published as books (and book voters outnumber short fiction voters). Among other things.

Kangaroo Court is by Virginia Kidd

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kangaroo Court by Virginia Kidd1 (Orbit #1, 1966) starts off as a satire about bureaucracy with Tulliver Harms, the First Exec of the Middle Seaboard Armies, sidelining other branches of government so he can deal militarily with an alien landing on Earth. Then Wystan Godwin, the story’s main character, arrives after six months in a Tibetan lamasery oblivious to all of this. Most of the rest of the first part of the story concerns Godwin’s readjustment to society (he buys some depilatory cream to make his hairstyle conform with the times, etc.), and his gradual awareness that he is being kept in the dark:

Still serenely certain that somehow, somewhere, the traditional Liaison packet was on its traditional way to him, Wystan Godwin—lacking even the one or two bits of information that might have triggered an assessment of the true situation—sat and waited for a sheaf of papers to bring him up to date. As Harms had foreseen, he never even thought of demeaning his position by actively seeking data from anyone in the complex. The only man of status equal to his, Harms himself, never spoke directly to him. Their sole contact was via dispute protocol, a procedure as ritualized as the mating dance of the bower bird. Harms’ dictum of later swallowed up fourteen days.  p. 101

This wordy and slightly affected semi-satire swallows up about a third of the story, until the point where Godwin (after a peculiar dispute between Harms and a draughtsman) eventually gets his hands on the briefing documents concerning the aliens. Then the story switches to become a first contact piece, beginning with a data dump of several pages from the liaison packet.
These papers reveal that the aliens are called the Leloc, and they are intelligent marsupial creatures virtually identical to the kangaroos on Earth (we later find that the latter are a devolved colony of Leloc left behind millions of years ago). We also learn about Leloc technology in general, and their Hilbert space drive in particular, which apparently causes temporal distortions (initially, if I recall correctly, the Leloc think they have been away from Earth for six months, not millions of years).
The final part of the story sees Godwin meet the Leloc in their spaceship, where he has to quickly learn their strange movement and number customs (there is a lot of standing up and sitting down, and people and Leloc coming and going with chairs). When the Leloc later learn that Harms is threatening to attack the ship they refuse to go to Australia to meet their descendants, and say they’ll stand their ground. Matters eventually proceed (spoiler) to an ending where Harms is kidnapped by the Leloc, and the latter’s leader is deposed and left behind.
This very much feels like the work of an amateur or neo writer: apart from the fact that it seems to be two stories fused into one, and has a huge data dump in the middle, it is buried under far too many words. And, to be honest, a lot of the incident in the story is of little interest.
It’s not dreadful, but it’s far from being any good; why Knight thought it would be a good idea, after eight months of reading submissions, to devote almost a third of the anthology to this is a mystery.
* (Mediocre). 18,200 words.

1. Kidd was previously married to James Blish, and was better known and an agent and editor than a writer. Her ISFDB page is here, and her Wikipedia page here.

Fiddler’s Green by Richard McKenna

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fiddler’s Green by Richard McKenna (Orbit #2, 1967) is the second of three posthumous stories that were published by Damon Knight in his Orbit anthology series and, off the back of McKenna’s story in the first volume, The Secret Place, I thought I’d have a look—it gets off to a cracking start with a group of men in a lifeboat dying of thirst and contemplating cannibalism:

On the morning of the fifth day Kinross woke knowing that before the sun went down one of them would be eaten. He wondered what it would be like.
All yesterday the eight dungaree- and khaki-clad seamen had wrangled about it in thirst-cracked voices. Eight chance-spared survivors adrift without food or water in a disabled launch, riding the Indian Ocean swells to a sea anchor. The S.S. Ixion, 6,000-ton tramp sneaking contraband explosives to the Reds in Sumatra, had blown up and sunk in ten minutes the night of December 23, 1959.
Fat John Kruger, the radioman, had not gotten off a distress signal. Four days under the vertical sun of Capricorn, off the steamer lanes and a thousand miles from land, no rain and little hope of any, reason enough and time, for dark thinking.
Kinross, lean and wiry in the faded dungarees of an engineer, looked at the others and wondered how it would go. They were in the same general positions as yesterday, still sleeping or pretending to sleep. He looked at the stubbled faces, cracked lips and sunken eyes and he knew how they felt. Skin tight and wooden, tongue stuck to teeth and palate, the dry throat a horror of whistling breath and every cell in the body, clamoring.
Thirst was worse than pain, he thought. Weber’s law for pain. Pain increased as the logarithm of what caused it; a man could keep pace. But thirst was exponential. It went up and up and never stopped. Yesterday they had turned the corner and today something had to give.  p. 37-38

We then get an account of the men’s recent conversations, which include such topics as whether human flesh boiled in seawater absorbs salt or not, and who they should eat. As they quarrel further, the youngest of them, Whelan, thinks he sees green fields in the distance, steps off the boat, and drowns.
After this the tension increases, and they eventually draw lots to see who they are going to kill. The viewpoint character, Kinross, picks the losing coin but, as they are discussing cutting his throat over a bucket to avoid losing any of his blood (“Damn you, Fay, I’m still alive,” Kinross says) one of the other men, Kruger, tells them of another way to get as much fresh water as they want.
Kruger goes on to explain how their reality, which he essentially describes as a consensual hallucination called the “public world,” can be left behind, and that they can go to a place of their own creation, giving the example of a patrol of soldiers lost in the Tibesti highlands of Africa who slipped from one world to another and later returned. Kruger gives other examples of this phenomenon, and his remarks cause much discussion and disbelief. But Kruger persists, saying that they can break through to this other world because, as he puts it, “God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east” (their position).
Eventually, he manages to convince the men to make an attempt, and they lie down and relax and listen to Kruger’s hypnotic voice. Then they make the transition.
All of this takes up the first fifth or so of the story, and it’s an impressive beginning. The next section, where the men investigate the strange world they have arrived in is also quite interesting. Initially it appears that this world is not quite fully formed, and one of their number, Silva, concentrates and tries to make the tree they pick fruit from more “detailed.” Then a grey mist appears and Kruger’s disembodied voice (he is lying unconscious elsewhere) warns Silva to stop. When Silva doesn’t do so he is struck blind. Later, Kinross and Garcia realise that all directions of travel lead back to the (unconscious) Kruger and the stream, and they also realise that they have lost all sense of time, and day or night.
So far, so Unknown Worlds, and this continues when Kruger (whose unconscious body is now in a cave) summons Kinross and tells him he cannot quench his thirst, and that he needs to share Kinross’s body in order to do so. Kruger also says that incorporating Kinross’s worldview will make their reality more stable and detailed.
When Kinross refuses an argument ensues, during which Kruger confesses to setting the bomb on the boat so he would have a chance to break through to this reality. Kinross tells Kruger that he may have made this world but that he isn’t going to help him get all the way into it. Kinross leaves, despite Kruger’s attempt to make him to stay.
The story runs along in this general direction for a bit longer before Kinross and Garcia follow the stream to a pit, where they end up rescuing an Australian woman called Mary who has wandered into their world through another rift. At this point the story becomes very strange, and we start to see various (aboriginal or Dreamtime?) spirits—black dwarves and pearly-gray women—hiding in the undergrowth. Later, a Peruvian wanders into camp and, when Kinross later discusses this with Kruger, they realise that their world is rotating over the Earth, gathering up other susceptible travellers. Kinross also asks Kruger about the spirits:

“I have other questions. What are the black dwarfs and pearly-gray women?”
“Nature spirits, I suppose you could call them. I stripped them from Mary and Bo Bo, husked them off by the millions until only a bare core of nothingness was left. What those two are now I couldn’t describe to you. But the world is partially self-operating and my load is eased.”  p. 78

The rest of the story sees more arrivals, including a climber called Lankenau who, when told what has happened to him, doesn’t want to go back to the real world. The narrative then becomes even more esoteric and mystifying: there is talk of magic rather than the Second Law of Thermodynamics operating in this world, and discussion that the spirits shed by people are unlived experiences or regrets. Later, Kinross stops placing daily sacrifices of fruit on Kruger’s altar, which causes a widespread frost and cold. Then there is a baffling exchange between Kinross and a Spanish-speaking woman which causes Garcia to warn Kinross not to come to the village. Finally, Kinross goes to Kruger’s altar, where he sees headless pigeons and blood, and smashes his fruit offering down hard enough to burst while saying it is “for Mary.” Then all sorts of (possibly magic realist) madness breaks free, which I won’t bother describing because—as it made no sense to me—it may not be pertinent information (although, at one point, a “red-capped mushroom” emerges from the Earth, so maybe that provides a clue, as may the fact that Kinross eventually ends up in our world with a blood-thirst).
This has a great start, interesting middle, and utterly baffling ending,1 but I’m not sure I’d bother with it unless you are a fan of puzzle stories that require multiple readings. And probably a friendly English professor.
* (Mediocre). 22,800 words.

1. There are perhaps some clues about what is going on in the story at this site, but the most useful one—a letter from David Tell at the bottom of the page with an explanation for the ending—has been partially deleted by a helpful webmaster (a village is obviously missing their idiot).

Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg (Omni Online, May 1995) starts in a Los Angeles recovery house where an ex-addict, Mattison, is monitoring a screen for volcanoes and lava outbreaks in the local area:

The whole idea of the Citizens Service House is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have “volunteered” to do community service—any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service even while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.
What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course.  p. 51 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

When there is a particularly serious eruption, Mattison’s team is sent by Volcano Central to support the local lava control teams in Pasadena. En route we get a description of this near-future LA:

The rains have made everything green, though. The hills are pure emerald, except where some humongous bougainvillea vine is setting off a gigantic blast of purple or orange. Because the prevailing winds this time of year blow from west to east, there’s no coating of volcanic ash or other pyroclastic crap to be seen in this part of town, nor can you smell any of the noxious gases that the million fumaroles of the Zone are putting forth; all such garbage gets carried the other way, turning the world black and nauseating from San Gabriel out to San Berdoo and Riverside.
What you can see, though, is the distant plume of smoke that rises from the summit of Mount Pomona, which is what the main cone seems to have been named. The mountain itself, which straddles two freeways, obliterating both and a good deal more besides, in a little place called City of Industry just southwest of Pomona proper, isn’t visible, not from here—it’s only a couple of thousand feet high, after six months of building itself up out of its own accumulation of ejected debris. But the column of steam and fine ash that emerges from it is maybe five times higher than that, and can be seen far and wide all over the Basin, except perhaps in West L.A. and Santa Monica, where none of this can be seen or smelled and all they know of the whole volcano thing, probably, is what they read in the Times or see on the television news.  p. 58

After the team successfully complete their task (which, basically, involves hosing down the lava flow so it forms a crust that dams what is behind it) they get sent to another job—but not until they demand, and get, a break:

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. “I sure wouldn’t mind a beer right now,” Evans says, and Hawks says, “Why don’t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you’re wishing things up? Don’t cost no more than beer, if it’s just wishes.”
“I never liked champagne,” Paul Foust says. “For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.” He smacks his lips. “I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut—”
“Knock it off,” says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.
“You never stop wanting it,” Foust tells him.
“Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don’t you think I know that? Knock it off.”
“Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?” Marty Cobos asks.
“And how about needles, too?” says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. “Let’s talk about needles too.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,” Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer. “What do you need to play around with my head for?”
“Why, did you have some kind of habit?” Mary Maude asks him sweetly.  p. 71

En route to the second job we see more scenes of volcanic Armageddon and, at one point, the crew pass something that looks like an Aztec sacrifice taking place at an intersection. Finally, at the second job (spoiler), there is a climactic scene that involves a moment of peril for one of this dysfunctional crew, and a chance of redemption for another.
This is a very readable and entertaining story (as you can see from the extensive quotes above), with a neat idea (albeit not an especially SFnal one) as well as characters that are both colourful and snarky. It’s a pretty good piece, and one I’d have for my “Year’s Best”. That said, the story feels like it is a bit longer than it needs to be (perhaps because of the vulcanology material, some of which feels like it comes straight from a very interesting holiday in Iceland), and the characters of the addicts are a bit too similar.
I note in passing that this doesn’t read like a Silverberg’s work at all, and felt more like one of those Marc Laidlaw & Rudy Rucker stories I’ve read recently.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 20,100 words.