Eric Flint's Blog, page 257

Raising Caine – Snippet 21

Raising Caine – Snippet 21

Chapter Twenty-Five

In orbit; GJ 1248 One (“Adumbratus”)

As Caine entered Gaspard’s otherwise empty quarters, he ignored the chair toward which the Frenchman waved an inviting hand. “Ambassador, we just heard that Yiithrii’ah’aash is on his way.”

Gaspard nodded. “I have been alerted, as well.”

“Then we need to settle something before we get down to what will probably be the swiftest, and most insufficient, strategic briefing in the annals of diplomacy. I need to know that, as we go forward, you can either ensure Ms. Veriden’s compliance with the protocols you yourself have approved, or that you put her under my direct command for the duration of this mission. I can’t do my job, otherwise.”

Riordan had expected an argument, possibly a brief tantrum. Instead, Gaspard simply nodded. “You have my apologies, Captain Riordan, and my thanks for salvaging today’s unfortunate situation on the planet. You and the entire legation were placed at risk. As was its chance of success. I have spoken with Ms. Veriden and she will follow the protocols I set for her, or she will spend the remainder of this mission confined to her quarters.”

Caine managed not to reveal his surprise at Gaspard’s frank and eminently sane response. “Thank you, Ambassador.” He took the indicated seat. “Actually, what concerns me most is that she didn’t inform us of her intent to avoid the Slaasriithi markers, and then did not alert us to that fact immediately afterward.”

Gaspard held helpless hands aloft. “I am often at a loss to explain her behavior. She is an intrinsically suspicious and cautious person, and so, she does not say much. Which I usually find quite agreeable in a guard.”

“But not so much, today?” Hwang added with a rueful smile.

Gaspard returned the expression. “It is as you say, Doctor. Today, I could have wished for her to be more communicative, more informative. Which is a natural segue to the business before us: in the matter of the experts’ xenosociological projections about the Slaasriithi, did they advance any theories about –?” The privacy chime sounded. Gaspard sighed. “Reality has preempted theorizing, it seems.” He rose. “Please enter.”

Yiithrii’ah’aash entered the room. He did so slowly, almost cautiously.

He stopped when Ben Hwang rose. “I mean no offense, Dr. Hwang, but you do not have sufficient clearance to remain for this particular meeting. My sincere regrets.”

Gaspard’s chin came up slightly. “Captain Riordan does not have my diplomatic rating, either, yet you are evidently prepared to allow him to stay.”

“Ambassador, Captain Riordan may remain because his standing with us is commensurate with the clearance assigned to you by your government.”

“In what way?”

“Allow me to ask you a question, Ambassador Gaspard. From what authority does your position as ambassador-plenipotentiary derive?”

“The political will of the Consolidated Terran Republic. Through that authority, I am empowered to make decisions for my species.”

“Yes. And Captain Riordan has an oft-demonstrated gift for understanding other species. This makes him a necessary part of our communication and so my race extends him recognition and standing equal to your own. We are pleased to have him remain, just as we were pleased to request him for our first contact in the Sigma Draconis system.”

Ben nodded and started toward the door. “If you’ll excuse me.”

Yiithrii’ah’aash made one deep, slow neck-bob and held it until Hwang had left. “I would very much regret if the doctor was affronted by my insistence upon protocols.”

“I doubt he was,” Gaspard commented diffidently, gesturing for the ambassador to sit. Which he did, although that posture more resembled a well-supported squat.

Yiithrii’ah’aash swiveled his head to focus directly upon Gaspard. “Ambassador, I must regrettably begin our meeting by insisting that you take whatever steps are necessary to exert greater control over your personnel.”

Caine interrupted. “I take full responsibility for Ms. Veriden’s actions –”

Yiithrii’ah’aash raised an objecting pair of finger-tendrils. “It has already been established that Ms. Veriden is not your responsibility. The matter lies with Ambassador Gaspard. It is his personal security assistant who has, within the space of one day, twice violated our requirements.”

Gaspard nodded noncommittally. “Yes, although I suspect the second incident might not have occurred had I been given time to confer with her regarding the full significance of her first violation. But our immediate departure after Captain Riordan recovered from the anti-intruder gas precluded that discussion. Similarly, with more time and warning, we could have better coordinated our visit to Adambratus, or least selected the right persons for inclusion.”

Yiithrii’ah’aash’s tendrils drooped. “While your analysis is no doubt accurate, it ignores our initial stipulation: that every member of your legation must visit these introductory planets. This prepares you to move about freely upon our homeworld, to help you understand and distinguish between the various taxae of my species and how best to interact with them.”

Riordan folded his arms. “While we’re on the topic of interacting with the locals, I noticed that the rover which pursued Ms. Veriden had a marked aversion to me. What did you do to ensure that my biomarkers were so much more effective than the others’?”

Yiithrii’ah’aash waved languorous tendrils. “Your preparation was no different from the others.”

Caine heard the evasive tone. “But that’s not the same thing as saying you don’t know why the rover had a stronger reaction to me.” He waited.

After several seconds, Yiithrii’ah’aash buzz-purred. “No, it is not the same statement. But I only possess conjectures on this matter, not knowledge. And there is no way to conclusively test my hypotheses.”

Gaspard leaned his fine-boned chin into his long-fingered hand. “Even so, I am most interested in your speculations.”

Yiithrii’ah’aash tilted his sensor-cluster in Caine’s direction. “This is not Captain Riordan’s first contact with our biota.”

Caine was stunned that he had not thought of this before. “Of course. The natives on Delta Pavonis Three. They probably still mark fauna, and visitors, with pheromones.”

Yiithrii’ah’aash raised attention-commanding digits from either pseudo-hand. “Since the primitives there have not entirely reverted, and since interspeciate pheromone-marking predates our tool-use, I suspect that you were multiply and powerfully marked on Delta Pavonis Three. But after at least twenty millennia of genetic recidivism and drift, that planet’s primitives may have marked you with pheromones that we no longer recognize.”

“But how would any pheromones remain active so long?” Gaspard wondered, frowning. “The captain visited Delta Pavonis Three over two years ago. Since then, he has twice been purged in preparation for extended periods of cryogenic suspension. How could a marking persist through all that?”

Yiithrii’ah’aash’s fingers writhed in apparent uncertainty. “I cannot say. However, markings have different depths. Most are superficial and can be removed by several meticulous bathings. However, some are not merely external but internal. They introduce microorganisms that produce the needed pheromones for excretion through fluids, perspiration, even wastes. Such markings could persist for years. Perhaps decades. Perhaps longer.”

Caine nodded, forced himself to sit calmly as his mind shouted: And our best decontamination procedures and most advanced biological screening didn’t detect anything? So how the hell do we know what they might choose to put in us now, and which we might be carrying back to the fleet? And then Earth? How do we know these microbes only mark us? And how can we be sure they won’t replicate and spread? Yes, the Slaasriithi have been amicable and helped us against the Arat Kur, but how do we really know they can be trusted? Because they told us so themselves? At the end of Yiithrii’ah’aash’s explanation, Riordan nodded one last time. “That’s very interesting. Thank you for explaining.”

 

Son Of The Black Sword – Snippet 20

Son Of The Black Sword – Snippet 20

Chapter 9

Protector of the Law, Ashok Vadal, twenty-year senior, rode through the lands of the great house that shared his name, dwelling on what he’d lost, what had been taken, and the legal questions pertaining to the proper way to end his life.

A light rain fell, more of a mist really. Ashok didn’t mind the rain. Water that came out of the sky was water’s purest form. It hadn’t had a chance to become corrupted yet. It wasn’t until it collected that it turned malicious. The night was dark and chilled. It gave him an excuse to keep his hood up and his distinctive insignia covered. It was best if word of his arrival didn’t spread. He was still riding the same poor, tired horse that had taken him into the Capitol, and from there all the way across the northeastern portion of the continent to Vadal. He’d only worn out one horse this time. There was no reason to try hard to reach this particular destination. Time was no longer of the essence, and the long weeks had given him time to think.

All that time hadn’t dulled his anger in the slightest.

Damn Mindarin. Damn Ratul. Damn them both along with their lies. Mindarin had put a curse on his head. Ashok had been offered a choice, to be a liar like them, but that was nothing but an illusion. The master must have known there was no way Ashok could continue living once given this knowledge. Ratul had broken the Law by allowing him to live to begin with, and ever since then the Order had perpetuated fraud in exchange for power. For the first time in his life Ashok was angry that the religious fanatics were deluded and there was no eternal soul and no eternal punishment, because they were dead, but that wasn’t enough. They still needed to suffer for the mockery they’d made of the Law…The Law was everything.

Protectors routinely sacrificed their lives so that the houses could have stability. Though he could understand the strategic reasons for why the masters had kept up the lie, he could never forgive them. And thus he would never forgive himself. Ignorance of the Law was no defense for violating it.

A cluster of lanterns told him there was a checkpoint ahead. Anyone crossing house borders was required to stop and present their travelling papers. A few wagons were waiting to have their cargos inspected and papers stamped. This was a busy trade road, so the checkpoint was practically a fort, but with the rain there wasn’t much of a line tonight. Protectors were of the highest caste, so all he needed to do was display his token of office and ride through, but since he was trying not to draw attention to himself, Ashok got into line. As usual, his horse was glad for the chance to stop for a bit.

“Almost there, Horse,” Ashok told the animal as he dismounted. When you spent months on the road with the same beast, you had to call it something, and he had never been one for titles, so Horse would do. Horse didn’t care. It just stuck its face into a trough of collected rainwater and drank.

The wagon ahead of him was nothing but a cage on wheels filled with a cargo of untouchables. It was hard to tell how many, because they were packed together. The cage didn’t have much of a roof, more of a canvas sunshade really, so the casteless had clumped together to try to stay warm in the rain, until they got to wherever their betters thought they belonged. Their clothing was nothing but rags. The adults wouldn’t make eye contact, but the children were staring at him, hungry and miserable. They looked tired, wet, abused, and completely used to it.

The casteless knew their place.

A merchant of the worker caste was standing next to his wagon, awaiting his inspection. He had an umbrella, a respectable coat, and shoes that probably kept his feet dry. He was clean, groomed, and even a little bit fat. He was even allowed a sword for protection. Ashok had never paid much attention to the worker’s ranks, as he was above them all so their relative differences were meaningless, but from the fine attire this one probably fell somewhere in the middle, above the laborers and farmers, but below a skilled craftsmen or a banker. Another worker was driving the wagon, he was below the merchant, but far, far above the casteless.

The workers knew their place.

Warriors of House Vadal were manning the checkpoint. They were fit, strong, and proud. They wore armor, not so different in design from Ashok’s own, but not nearly as expensive or well-constructed. Their weapons were cared for, and unlike the merchant’s sword, they didn’t require a permit to possess one. The soldiers seemed bored. This bureaucratic necessity was beneath them, but their duty required them to be here, biding their time until the next fight, when their house would spend their lives as readily as the workers spent money.

The warriors knew their place.

Through the door of the checkpoint, he could see that a low-ranking arbiter was sitting on a padded stool behind a large table. A brazier next to him provided warmth and enough light to make sure the travelling papers weren’t forgeries. He collected the tariffs, stamped the papers, and wrote in his ledger. The bureaucracy was required to lead and organize, and it was what made sure the rest of the castes worked as designed. Only the lowest of the governing caste would be assigned to such a duty, especially during the slow hours of the night, but even then this man could command all of the others and they would obey without question.

The first caste knew their place.

All men had their place within the Law…except for him.

What am I?

Ashok was an anomaly, and that made him an abomination as much as any creature of witchcraft or demon that slithered from the sea.

The arbiter declared the merchant’s papers to be in order. The warriors opened the gate, and the casteless rolled on to their destiny. When it was Ashok’s turn to present himself to the arbiter, he simply opened his cloak and displayed his insignia. The arbiter immediately began babbling about how the allegations of bribery against him were nothing more than slander and to please have mercy. Since it was against the Law for a Protector to investigate his own house, this man’s possible crimes were not Ashok’s problem, but a few stern words assured him that this particular arbiter would make no mention of his passing through. He was able to return to his journey, with Great House Vadal being unaware that the bearer of its mighty ancestor blade had returned.

Ashok knew he needed to be destroyed, for there was no place for a man without a place, but that was where the legal conundrum arose. There were certain obligations for a bearer. The blade’s continued use was far more important than the fate of a single bearer. His existence was a crime, but so would be his execution. A dishonorable death might cause the incredibly valuable sword to shatter. Suicide was a coward’s death and would offend Angruvadal. Much thought had gone into his problem and what solution would best satisfy these competing requirements during the long journey, but this would have to be a question for the judges. He didn’t care if he lived or died as long as justice was served.

Regardless of his fate, there was one last thing to be done before giving up his office and submitting himself to judgment.

The ones who created this fraud had to die.

Justice demanded it.

 

A Call To Arms – Snippet 21

A Call To Arms – Snippet 21

“Right,” Merripen said. There was a short pause. “Okay, we’re up and running — ninety gees acceleration. How soon before you get that thing back together?”

“A couple of hours at least,” Grimm said, wishing now that he hadn’t been so thorough in his disassembly. “You just worry about your part of the job.”

“On it.”

Keying on his uni-link, Grimm punched for Bettor. “Status report.”

“It’s coming along,” Bettor said, his voice tight. “Was that a shot I just heard?”

“It was,” Grimm confirmed. “That RMN ship — the Salamander — decided they needed to get up close and cozy. Shresthra wouldn’t get us moving, so I relieved him of command.”

“And we’re moving now?” Bettor growled. “Great. That’s not going to look suspicious or anything.”

“Bottom line for you is that we may have to cut your sampling time short,” Grimm said, ignoring the dig. “Will two or three more hours be enough?”

“I guess we’ll find out. You want me to lock down here and go to the bridge?”

“Yes, at least until Merripen finishes his sweep.”

“Okay. What do I do if the Manticorans call?”

“Just pipe it down here,” Grimm said. “I’ll handle it.”

* * *

“They’re running?” Fairburn demanded, part of his brain refusing to believe the evidence of his eyes.

“Confirmed,” Tactical Officer Wanda Ravel said. “She’s up to point eight KPS squared. Seems to have leveled off, though a ship of that class ought to have another few gravities in reserve.”

“Probably waiting to see our response,” Todd murmured.

Fairburn scowled at his displays. There was no reason for Izbica to be doing this. None. She was a freighter, damn it, and freighters had only one purpose in life: to fly cargoes back and forth and make money doing it. Izbica was beyond the hyper limit and on her way to Minorca, and the next item on her checklist would be spinning up her hyperdrive and hitting the Alpha band. This extra n-space acceleration made zero sense.

Unless her new purpose in life was to get away from Salamander.

Smugglers? Ridiculous. Izbica had been in Manticoran orbit for nearly a week, with every hour bringing the possibility that Customs would suddenly decide to drop in and take a look at her cargo. Granted, the probability that anyone would do something like that was pretty small, but it was still possible. If Captain Shresthra hadn’t been worried about an examination then, why would he be worried about one now?

The Cascan mass-murderer? Same logical problem.

So why run from Salamander? And why run now? Could it be because Fairburn, unlike Manticoran Customs, was definitely talking about boarding her?

Mentally, he shrugged. He could speculate all day without coming up with anything. Sometimes the best way to an answer was just to ask.

“Increase acceleration to one point four KPS squared and recalculate zero-zero,” he ordered. “Com, get me a laser on Izbica. Let’s see if Shresthra has a logical explanation.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Todd asked.

“Then we’d best be ready, hadn’t we?” Fairburn countered. “Bring us to General Quarters, if you please.” He smiled tightly. “We’re on a training exercise, after all. Might as well run the crew all the way up.”

* * *

“Damn,” Grimm muttered.

“Yeah, I think damn pretty well covers the situation,” Bettor’s tight voice came from the intercom. “Now what?”

“Let’s not panic,” Grimm soothed as he eased the board he’d just finished back into position. Just three more to reassemble and replace, and the interface would be up and running again. “They can’t possibly catch up with us before we’re ready to get out of here.”

“They could still fire a missile.”

“They won’t,” Grimm assured him. “They have no reason to attack and nothing to gain. And missiles are damned expensive.”

“Yeah.” For a moment Bettor was silent. “Though, you know…maybe we should give them a reason.”

Grimm blinked. “Come again?”

“I’m trying to come up with a good reason why we’re running,” Bettor said. “I mean, a reason from their point of view. We can’t be smugglers — if we weren’t worried about Manticoran Customs finding some special cargo a week ago, we shouldn’t be worried about the Salamander finding it now. We can’t be accelerating just for the fun of it — merchant ships run too close to the margin to waste energy that way. What’s left?”

Grimm pursed his lips. Unfortunately, Bettor had a point. It would take a huge leap of intuition for the Manticorans to guess that the Izbica was secretly collecting data on a wormhole junction that no one even suspected was here. But in the absence of any other reason, someone could conceivable wander off down that path.

And Grimm’s team’s job wasn’t just to collect data, but to make sure no one knew that they were collecting it.

“I guess what’s left is the most obvious one of all,” he told Bettor. “They still waiting?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Patch me through.”

There was a brief pause — “You’re on.”

“Hello, Captain Fairburn,” Grimm called toward the intercom. “This is Captain Stephen Grimm of the Solarian Merchantman Izbica. How can I assist you?”

There was a long silence, longer than the normal light-speed time lag for their current distance would account for. Grimm had the third-to-last board halfway reassembled by the time the Salamander finally responded. “Apparently, our records are in error,” Fairburn’s calm voice came over the speaker. “We have Stephen Grimm listed as a passenger, not the captain.”

“There’s been a slight shake-up in the chain of command,” Grimm told him. “None of your concern. What do you want?”

Silence descended as his words began their slow, speed-of-light journey to the distant RMN vessel. “What exactly are we going for here?” Bettor asked. “You hoping to convince him we’re pirates?”

“That’s the big buzz word around here these days,” Grimm reminded him. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get them to that conclusion. Once they do, they won’t look for other possibilities.”

“What are you going to do if he asks why we didn’t take the ship sooner?”

“Probably spin some nonsense about hoping Shresthra would pick up some high-tech stuff at Manticore we could add to our loot,” Grimm said. “But I doubt he’ll ask. Their focus now should be on doing whatever they can to catch us.”

“But they can’t catch us, right?” Bettor asked, his voice sounding just a little apprehensive. “You’re going to have that interface finished in time, right?”

“Don’t you worry your little head,” Grimm soothed. “A Salamander-class destroyer can pull a maximum of two hundred gees, but they’re not going to go over one-seventy. We can safely do about eighty. At our current vector differential — look, you can run the numbers yourself if you want. Bottom line: we’ll be out of here before they can get even close to a zero-zero.”

The speaker hissed with a sigh. “If you say so,” Bettor said. “You’d just better be right.”

* * *

Grimm’s — Captain Grimm’s — message ended, and for a long moment Salamander’s bridge was silent.

Not for lack of anything to say, Fairburn knew. But merely because everyone was thinking the same thing.

Izbica had been hijacked. And there was only one reason why a simple freighter with no ransom-worthy people aboard would be seized.

Grimm and his fellow passengers were pirates.

Pirates.

The word seemed to hang in front of Fairburn’s eyes. After all these years of sifting through flight data, listening to rumors, and traveling across interstellar space, he and Salamander finally had found real, living, breathing pirates.

And unless he did something fast, those pirates were going to get away.

He squared his shoulders. “Increase acceleration to one point eight KPS squared,” he ordered, wishing briefly that his voice was the deep, resonant type. This was history in the making. “And recalculate for zero-zero.”

There was a brief silence, and he knew what they were all thinking. Eighty percent of maximum acceleration was one point six KPS squared, and standing orders were to stay below that line unless at dire need.

But Izbica held the proof that would finally and permanently shut up Chancellor Breakwater and the rest of the doubters in Parliament. There was no way in hell that Fairburn was going to let that proof get away.

The rest of the bridge crew knew that, too. That, or they knew better than to argue with their captain. “One point eight KPS squared, aye,” the helm confirmed.

“Recalculating zero-zero,” Ravel added.

“Good,” Fairburn said. “And go to Readiness One,” he added. “Izbica appears to have taken by pirates.” History in the making… “We’re going to take her back.”

 

Raising Caine – Snippet 20

Raising Caine – Snippet 20

Chapter Twenty-Four

In orbit; GJ 1248 One (“Adumbratus”)

Karam Tsaami, his head half into the avionics interface bay on the bridge of the TOCIO shuttle, nearly knocked off the top of his skull when a female voice murmured, “Hey,” not half a meter behind him. The resulting occipital thwack literally made his vision swim — and made his uninvited visitor chuckle.

Determined to show just how little enthusiasm he had for being a source of slapstick humor, Karam yanked his torso out of the bay, ready to tear the head off whatever damn fool had —

He discovered Dora Veriden watching him with a sardonic smile. “You always that graceful?”

“No,” Karam grumbled, rubbing the back of his head and unsuccessfully trying to remember what choice cascade of insults he had been preparing to unleash. “Sometimes I’m really clumsy.”

Veriden grinned, flopped down into the copilot’s couch, avoiding the various screens and protuberances of the half glass/half “steam” cockpit. And Tsaami realized, she’s knows her way around flight controls.

“Yeah,” she agreed, “you are clumsy. And sometimes you’re really stupid, too.”

Karam stared at her. “You’re welcome.”

“Huh?” she replied.

“Well, I figure that tracking me down on the shuttle so you can insult me is your own special way of saying thanks for my chasing after the monster that was trying to eat you earlier today.”

He had intended his tone to indicate that his comment was as ironic as hers. But Dora’s considerable brows met in a descending vee. “Didn’t ask for your help, and didn’t want it. Which is part of why I’m here: you were damned stupid chasing after that thing. It could’ve eviscerated you.”

“Yeah, well, it seemed like you could use a hand. Or at least a diversion. So I –”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about: that was really stupid. If I need your help, I’ll ask for it. But your macho button got pressed and out you charged, making just that much more trouble for me. Because then I had your safety to worry about, too.”

“Hey, I was safe enough. You were its only target, and I’ve heard through the grapevine why that was. But secondly, I didn’t charge out there because of machismo,” he asserted half-truthfully. “I’ve been shuttling people back and forth to new planets and new colonies for ten years, now. When they run into trouble, I go help. It’s that simple. It’s reflex: not duty, not machismo. Get it?” Karam almost believed the whole spiel himself. Damn, I’m good.

Dora Veriden frowned. “Okay, fair enough. Because you’d have been pretty disappointed if you were motivated by hopeful chivalry.”

“You mean because of the peculiar way you show gratitude?”

“No: I mean because I don’t usually walk on your side of the sexual street.”

Karam felt his eyebrows come down, then jump up. “Oh.” He shrugged: not like that was a big deal, or would have influenced his actions one bit.

“Oh,” he repeated and felt like an idiot. They sat in the pilot and copilot couches in silence for almost half a minute. It felt like half an hour.

“Look,” Dora started as suddenly as their semi-conversation had stopped, “I came here to explain something to you. And only to you.”

“Are you asking me to keep it a secret?”

She thought for a moment. “No. I just don’t feel I owe anyone else the real explanation for why I didn’t put on the marker spray.”

Karam cocked his head. “Really? Not Cai — Captain Riordan? Hell, he got in the critter’s way.”

Dora had made a face. “First, that was his job, right? And second, I’m not in the habit of thanking the people who’ve made a career out of using me.”

“Whoa, whoa: Riordan has made a career out of using you?”

Dora rolled her eyes. “Hey, figurative language alert. Not him, personally, no, but people like him.” When she saw the unrelieved perplexity in Karam’s face she threw up her hands. “Government types. Our Illustrious Leaders. Protectors of the Social Contract.”

Karam found he really didn’t want to argue with Dora — which was odd because he had a natural gift for contrarianism — so he frowned and shook his head. “I think you may want to revisit your assumptions about Caine.”

“You mean, Captain Caine Riordan? The guy who was sent by governments to find exosapients on Delta Pavonis Three? Who then made his report at the interbloc Parthenon Dialogs? Who was then appointed as the primary liaison for the international delegation to the Convocation of the Accord, and who then fought in the war we just finished? You mean that dedicated antigovernment figure?”

Karam kept his voice level. “Seems you’ve filled your own pockets with more than a few kings’ coins, over time.” Seeing Dora’s dark olive toned skin darkening even further, he hastened to add, “All I’m saying is that what people do isn’t always a reliable indicator of their sympathies, of why they did those things.”

“Are you saying that Riordan is antigovernment? He sure doesn’t seem like it to me. His current uniform and titles fit him like a glove.”

Karam shrugged. “Yeah, but Caine hasn’t been very popular in the halls of government, either.”

“No? He charge too much?”

“No: he has a bad habit of telling the truth. Including the truths that governments don’t like hearing.”

Dora slouched back, arms crossed, but she didn’t follow up with a new gibe.

Karam leaned back as well. “We got to know each other pretty well on the way out here. All the other guys knew him from before.”

“Yeah; all servitors of the state.”

“Yeah, servitors of states which protected Caine, but weren’t always comfortable with him or what he might do. Of which those protectors were apprised.”

Dora nodded faintly. “So they were really his warders.”

Karam tilted his head from side to side, not disagreeing, but not wholly agreeing either. “It’s more nuanced that that.”

“Oh, it always is. Naked oppression is never naked oppression. Except when it is. But then the victims deserve it.”

Karam couldn’t keep himself from rolling his eyes. “Look, I’m sure you’ve got a boat-load of witty barbs and come-backs for every occasion and this one in particular. But the bottom line is this: from what I can tell, Caine has considerable reservations about how much anyone can trust government. But he usually takes the side of government against megacorporations which are trying to become more powerful than nations because he doesn’t trust those at all. And given how CoDevCo tried selling our whole species into Ktoran slavery just a year ago, I can’t say that he was too far off.”

Dora frowned, looked out the cockpit windows; the shields were mostly closed, so only a narrow slit of starfield was visible. When she spoke again, her voice wasn’t as hard, had a musical flow rather than a staccato edge. “I grew up in Trinidad, mostly. My grandmama was one of the refugees during the Megadeath famines. She was tough as nails. Had my Mom even before she married my grandad, who died during one of the anti-refugee riots of the Fifties. So grandad’s mother took in my grandma and helped raise my infant mother, whose health was never good. Might have been one of the immune viruses that came along with the refugees. Might have been years of malnutrition before the richer countries decided to help the ones they abandoned during the Megadeath.

“Anyhow, I remember when the big countries started coming back. And when they did — even before they brought food, even before they started reopening our hospitals — they sent ‘health workers.’ And do you know what those health workers did first?”

Karam, who had grown up in Toronto and hadn’t the faintest idea of the conditions which had been prevalent in poorer countries after the Megadeath, shook his head.

Dora grimaced, and if her expression usually fluctuated between sardonic and angry, it now slid toward bitter and sad. “The health workers — health workers — from the big countries came in and dusted us with poisons. Poisons to kill lice, poisons to kill bed bugs, poisons to kill chiggers. And then our own governments dusted us with poisons to kill fungi, because they knew that any new clothes we received we’d try to save for good. We’d hide them away in a closet, where they would get filthy with mold in a month.”

She scratched her shoulder-length hair distractedly. “Dusted dusted dusted. You could always smell it; you could always feel it. The health workers claimed that, in order to be effective, it had to be everywhere. And it was. Everywhere. I had only two sets of clothes: torn pants and an old shirt for work and a faded, fraying dress for ‘good.’ And it didn’t matter how much you washed them; the dust was always on them, in the seams, inside the fabric. It got inside of us, too, I guess. Sure got inside of my mom. Killed her.”

Karam hadn’t intended it, but his voice came out as a whisper. “Your mom died of poisoning?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what caused her leukemia, or myeloma, or whatever cancer killed her.” Dora’s voice grew distant, distracted. “There was a big surge in toxin-related cancers, at that time. But after the famine and epidemic death-counts of the Megadeath, no one much worried about what might kill you ten years later. Everyone was still worried about staying alive for the next week, the next month.” Her eyes and voice resharpened. “Until, of course, our old colonial masters returned in the guise of megacorporations who employed us for pennies on the dollar to work in conditions that wouldn’t have passed the health codes of any Developed nation.”

“I’m sorry,” mumbled Karam.

If Dora heard, she didn’t give any sign of it. “So I don’t like getting dusted or sprayed with anything. Not then, not now, not ever.” She turned to him. “It wasn’t your job to help me. And you don’t know me from Eve. And you seem like a decent enough guy. So I wanted you to know why today’s attack occurred. It was on me, and only on me. I endangered myself, and that was my business. Maybe I endangered others, too, which wasn’t my business, but that only makes it all the more stupid that you were trying to help me. Of anyone out there on that alien grassland today, I was the person no one should have been helping.”

“But you were the one who needed the help.”

“Damn, Karam, you are one thick-skulled moron, aren’t you?”

“I like you, too.”

She rolled her eyes. “Look, didn’t your mother or someone tell you to stay away from trouble? Well, I’m that trouble.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t much listen to Mom.”

“Well, this time you probably should. I’m not safe to get too close to. Hell, that’s why they named me Dora.”

“Um…Dora isn’t exactly a name that says, ‘danger! danger!'”

She shook her head. “You wouldn’t think so, would you? Hell, even I didn’t get it until I was older. Growing up, I just thought I was named after Dora the Explorer.”

“Named after who?”

Dora smiled ruefully. “Dora the Explorer. It was an old, old video show for kids. But we still had it because — well, because my grandmama hoarded crap. We had six different computers stashed away, and we used them up, starting with the oldest first. But damn, grandmama was one shrewd lady: she could patch together kluges of software that should never have worked, and videos, and songs, and, well, you get the picture. So there was this show, Dora the Explorer. She was this girl adventurer who looked a little like me, and was Latina like me — kind of. I watched it a lot. I knew my mom had, too, so I thought she had named me after Dora.

“But my mom died when I was only five, so I never thought to ask her. I just assumed it, and I kept assuming it until my grandmama was dying and called me by my real name, the name my mom had actually given me: Pandora. The mystery box that should not be opened.” She rose from the couch. “So you might want to think about who you go saving, or trying to become friends with.”

Karam shrugged. “If I had to do it again, I would. Because it doesn’t matter who you are, or who you aren’t.” Well, mostly.

Dora threw up her hands. “I just can’t beat the stupid out of you, can I?”

“Not now, you can’t,” Karam muttered as a message scrolled across his comms monitor. “Yiithrii’ah’aash is about to arrive.”

 

A Call To Arms – Snippet 20

A Call To Arms – Snippet 20

“You think we should signal Salamander?” Travis suggested. “She’s in range to head over and see what’s going on.”

“She’s also got the same sensor suite we do,” Fornier reminded him. “Don’t worry — if there’s anything worth investigating, Fairburn’s already on it.”

“I hope so.”

In the background, the XO’s voice came on the intercom: Phoenix was now at full Readiness One.

“Meanwhile, we have a drill to run,” Fornier said. “Let’s get to it.”

* * *

“I assure you, Captain Lord Baron Fairburn, we have no need of assistance,” the voice of Izbica’s captain came over Salamander’s bridge speaker.

Captain Fairburn, Fairburn corrected him silently. Or Baron Fairburn. Or Lord Fairburn. Pick one and stick with it.

Maybe the man assumed Baron was Fairburn’s given name. Maybe he was just an idiot who didn’t bother to read up on the proper protocol for the places he was going to visit.

Fairburn was betting on the second option.

“One of our passengers has seen this before,” Shresthra continued. “He says it’s just a matter of taking the interface apart, cleaning it and checking all the connections, and reassembling it. A few hours, and we’ll be on our way again.”

“Very well, Captain Shresthra,” Fairburn said. “Again, we’re only a couple of hours away from you. Don’t hesitate to call if you decide you’d like us to look over your equipment.”

It would be another minute and a half before there was any response. But Fairburn wasn’t expecting anything except a polite farewell from the freighter. Shresthra apparently had everything under control, and the matter was closed.

And yet…

“Com, were you able to find that report?” he asked.

“Yes, Sir, I think so,” Chief Marulich replied from the com station, touching a key on her console. “Is this it?”

Fairburn peered at the report. It was a couple of weeks old, filed with System Command by Phoenix’s XO, Commander Vance Sladek. Someone aboard had come up with some scatterbrained idea about the Cascan mass-murderer being aboard Izbica. For some reason Sladek had thought it plausible enough to kick an enquiry back to Manticore. “That’s the one,” he confirmed. “Did you find any follow-up?”

“Not much of one,” Marulich said, peering at her display. “It looks like Customs checked Izbica’s backtrack and then compared her crew and one of her passengers to the image of the Haven murderer. No matches, so it was marked concluded.”

Which was all Customs could reasonably be expected to do, Fairburn knew, especially given the source of the suspicion. He’d heard his share of ship’s scuttlebutt over the years, and was surprised that the theory hadn’t included the Flying Dutchman among Izbica’s secret passengers. And without anything more solid, Customs certainly wouldn’t have called in their big brothers in MPARS to board the vessel.

On the other hand…

“How many passengers are there?” he asked.

“The personnel file lists three.”

“And Customs only checked one of them?”

“The other two never came down to the planet, so they were never scanned.”

Fairburn frowned. Izbica had been a full week in orbit, and he’d never seen a freighter crew yet where everyone wasn’t off the ship and on the ground as fast as they could physically get there.

Yet two of Izbica’s passengers had never left? “She came from Casca, right? Do we know if those two passengers left ship while she was there?”

“I can check, Sir,” Marulich said doubtfully. “But I doubt we have that information.”

“And Shresthra said it was one of the passengers who was working on the hyperdrive interface,” Commander Todd murmured from behind Fairburn.

“Meaning?” Fairburn asked.

“No idea, Sir,” the XO admitted. “It just seems odd that Shresthra would be letting a passenger into the guts of his ship.”

Fairburn ran a finger over his lower lip. Odd. Not threatening or suspicious, just odd. Certainly nothing Salamander had reason to look into.

Then again, there was also no reason why she couldn’t look into it.

“Helm, plot me a zero-zero intercept course to Izbica,” he ordered. “Make acceleration one point two KPS squared.”

He swiveled around and eyed his XO. “Let’s go be neighborly.”

* * *

“How much longer?” Shresthra asked, his hands opening and closing with barely-controlled impatience.

“Two minutes less than when you asked two minutes ago,” Grimm said as soothingly as he felt like being right now.

Which wasn’t very much. He understood Bettor’s need to continue compiling data and was fully prepared to drag out this interface project as long he needed to. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t starting to wish Shresthra wouldn’t keel over from a heart attack or something.

“You said it would take three hours,” Shresthra bit out. “It’s already taken four, and you’ve barely started.

“You did say it would only take three,” the engineer, Pickers, added.

“That was before I realized how filthy everything in here was,” Grimm countered, waving the board he was working on for emphasis. “I don’t think either of you appreciates just how much this amount of caked grime can affect the current flow. These things are extremely delicate –”

“Captain?” the voice of the helmsman, Nguema, boomed from the crawlspace intercom. “That Navy ship — the Salamander? — it’s heading our way.”

Grimm felt his stomach tighten. What the hell?

“What for?” Shresthra asked. “Damn it all — I told them we don’t need any help.”

“They know,” Nguema said. “They say they’re just running crew drills and might as well run them this direction.”

“Very convenient,” Grimm said, his mind racing. At all costs he had to keep that Navy ship out of here. If they came aboard, for any reason, they might take it into their pointy little heads to look into the cargo holds.

And with Bettor’s sampling equipment unpacked, assembled and sucking in data, that would be a disaster. The very fact that someone was running a secret experiment would be enough of an excuse for Captain Fairburn to commandeer the freighter and haul it back to Manticore for further study.

“Also potentially very pricey,” he added. “Some systems charge a fee for rescues, you know.”

“We don’t need a rescue,” Shresthra insisted.

“Of course we don’t,” Grimm said. “We’ll have this back together in no time.” But not before the Salamander arrived, he knew. Not unless the Izbica got off her rear and opened up a little more distance. “Best way to show them that would be to throw a few gravs on the fire and get moving. Sooner or later, they’ll get tired of chasing us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nguema scoffed. “I’m not going to blow off energy for that.”

“They’re not going to charge anything anyway,” Pickers added. “The fee-for-rescue thing is a myth.”

“And there’s no point in getting any farther out than we already are,” Shresthra concluded. “Especially if we find out you can’t put that back together.” He jabbed a finger at the disassembled interface.

Grimm clenched his teeth. He hadn’t wanted to do this, certainly not here and now. But the very fact that the Salamander was heading in their direction showed that something had made the captain suspicious. And once the destroyer was alongside there would be nothing he could do except hope and pray that the Manticorans didn’t find Bettor’s precious instruments.

And Grimm had never been much for praying.

“We need to get moving,” he told Shresthra, keeping his voice low and calm. Merripen would be on the bridge, he knew, keeping track of things up there. “Please.”

The captain’s eyes narrowed. “Do we, now,” he said, matching Grimm’s volume. “Why exactly is that?”

“That’s not important,” Grimm said. “Just call Nguema and have him get us moving.”

“I see.” Shresthra took a deep breath. “Nguema?”

“Yes?”

“Shut down the impellers,” Shresthra ordered. “I repeat: shut down the impellers. Then call the Salamander and request –”

“Merripen?” Grimm cut him off.

“I’m here,” Merripen’s voice came faintly from the intercom.

“Do it.”

Shresthra frowned at Grimm. “Do what –?”

He broke off at the soft, distant-sounding crack from the speaker.

“Nguema?” he called. “Nguema?”

“I’m sorry,” Grimm apologized. “But I did say please.”

And before the captain could do more than open his eyes wider in a disbelieving stare, Grimm drew his own gun and shot him. Pickers had just enough time for a surprisingly feminine squeak before Grimm shot him, too.

“Merripen?” he called again.

“Bridge is secure,” Merripen’s voice came back, as stolid and emotionless as always. “He didn’t get the wedge down. Want me to get us moving?”

“Immediately,” Grimm confirmed, slipping the half-cleaned board back into its slot in the interface. “Then go finish off the rest of the crew. I’ll send Bettor to the bridge to watch things while you do that.”

 

Son Of The Black Sword – Snippet 19

Son Of The Black Sword – Snippet 19

“Yes, Lord Protector,” Ashok said.

“Your house has given you to us. Do you willingly give your life over to the Order?”

He hadn’t asked that to the others, except the others didn’t possess an ancient device capable of destroying them all. “Yes, Lord Protector.”

“You will follow your instructions without question?”

“I will.”

“You will do exactly as I say. I am Ratul, twenty-five-year master. This is Mindarin, eighteen-year senior. If I am indisposed or dead you will answer to him. Now, keep your sword sheathed and remove it from your person.” Ashok unbuckled his sword belt. The Protector stuck out his hand. “Give it to me.”

“Master!” one of the acolytes warned. “It will destroy you.”

“According to tradition, only if I should try to wield it.” The old Protector took hold of the belt strap. The sword hung there, leather creaking, as he held it at arm’s length. Ashok could tell the sword wasn’t offended. Ratul addressed the sword with far more respect than he had given any of the representatives of the great houses. “We mean no disrespect, Angruvadal. First the Law must be upheld.” Then he passed the sword to the senior Mindarin, who took it without hesitation, though he was careful not to touch the sword itself.

Kule looked on as if this was all mildly amusing.

The master roughly put his hands on both sides of Ashok’s face. The boy flinched, but the Protector dragged him over and forced Ashok’s eyes open with his thumbs. He stared through Ashok’s eyes and there was a terrible pain inside his head. Ashok didn’t flinch. “I thought so.” The Protector let go, and the pain subsided. “There is magic in this boy.”

“Some,” Kule agreed.

“What have you done to him, wizard?”

“As a child, Ashok suffered a terrible accident. A fire in the middle of the night and his family perished. He alone survived, but was found in the ruins of their home, with heart, mind, and body broken. Since he was of the first caste, our Thakoor had me put him back together. Good thing too, since he was later chosen by the sword. No illegal magic was used in the healing, I can assure you. My notes about his treatment are available to Inquisition auditors if you would like them examined.”

“I do not trust you.”

Kule may have shrugged. It was difficult to tell beneath the thick coat. “Then you must ask yourself, Lord Protector, does your Order want access to the sword or not?”

The master folded his arms, seemingly deep in thought, staring at Ashok. Not having his sword at his side was unnerving, so Ashok found the crack in the wall and fixed his attention on that again.

“The mere presence of such a device within the Order will deter lawbreakers,” Mindarin said, still carefully holding the sword as if it were a serpent that might bite him. “I believe it to be worth the risk. I will accept responsibility for this one.”

Ratul nodded slowly. “Very well…If Ashok cannot be controlled you’re the one that has to try and kill him. Note, I said try. You’ve not seen what a bearer can do.” He turned back to Kule. “Wizard, your house’s obligation has been accepted. Get out.”

Kule bowed again, then turned and shuffled out the door without another word. Even though Ashok had lived in the wizard’s household while he’d been healing from the accident, there wasn’t so much as a farewell. Ashok kept staring at the crack while the Protectors clustered around the hanging sword.

“Do those Vadal fools have any idea the risk they are taking? Are their heads crammed so far up their own asses that they think being the talk of the Capitol is worth losing their house?” Ratul mused.

“Maybe a great house is really that devoted to upholding the Law?”

They all laughed.

It was almost as if he had been forgotten entirely. Ashok was temporarily thankful, but that moment passed and Ratul returned his attention to him. “Ashok. You are now an acolyte in the Order of Protectors. Your training begins immediately. Devedas will escort you to the barracks. That will be all.”

One of the acolytes stepped forward. “This way.” Though he was not that much older than Ashok, he already carried himself like a Protector, and to Ashok’s inexperienced eye appeared to be nearly as dangerous as the others.

The other newly obligated had all been armed. Ashok looked to Mindarin, and then to his sword, hanging there, creaking against the leather. “May I have my sword back now?”

“No,” Ratul answered.

“Why?”

Ratul frowned, then nodded at one of the older acolytes. That one stepped forward and struck Ashok in the face. The force snapped his head back on his neck and sent him crashing hard into the floor.

Blood came rolling out of his nose and he could taste it on his lip. Ashok could feel Angruvadal’s desire to help. No…He had made a mistake. Ratul’s actions had been correct. Ashok held no animosity. The sword was content.

“Questioning an order? Already you’re off to a fine start.”

“Lord Protector, if I may…” Devedas interjected. “This one isn’t like the others. That sword is more than a weapon to him. Part of his fire is inside it forever. To a bearer, losing his blade is worse than one of us losing an arm.”

Ashok wiped the blood from his lip, got up, and stood at attention. Devedas was correct. He couldn’t even remember a time before the sword.

“Hmmm…You would know of such things. What did your father do after he was deprived of his ancestor blade?”

“He slowly went mad until he flung himself into the sea to be devoured by demons, Lord Protector,” Devedas answered.

“Seems reasonable…So Ashok, I’ll grant an answer to your question as to why you cannot have your sword. Our program does not test fifty generations of a house. It does not test the strength of your ancestors. It tests you and you alone. You will survive or perish on your own merits, not by the memories within your sword. You will have no advantage over your brothers. If you fail and live, it will be returned to you. If you fail and die, it will be returned to your house along with your corpse. If you go insane, the nearest ocean is two hundred miles that direction, but since we’re on the side of a mountain there are plenty of places to leap to your death if you are so inclined. You certainly wouldn’t be the first acolyte to do so.”

Ashok continued staring at the wall. Ratul correctly took that as assent.

“Know this, Ashok, there is no room in the Order for weakness, so I will not give you a crutch. To do so would only make you weaker than you could be. The Law is only as strong as those who enforce it. If you last long enough to prove that you are worthy on your own to be one of us, then I will return your sword. Until then it will remain in our vault. Don’t worry. None of us are fool enough to try to use it, and if anyone unworthy attempts to steal it, we both know what the sword will do to them. You are dismissed.”

* * *

The barracks were as frigid as the audience chamber. There were no beds, just woven mats on the floor. Devedas directed Ashok toward one corner. “You will be issued a uniform and basic supplies. Get some rest. Tomorrow is going to be the hardest day of your life. Then it will get worse.”

“Thank you for explaining my hesitation to Master Ratul.”

“It was the truth, nothing more. That’s our job. When you’ve gained the respect of your seniors you’ll be allowed to speak freely as well. Until then, it’s best if you keep your mouth shut.”

“Your father was a bearer?”

“Perhaps I did not emphasize, mouth shut,” Devedas said. “At this rate I’ll be amazed if you last a week.”

Ashok bowed. Annoyed, the older student just shook his head and left the barracks.

The sleeping mat was very thin. He could feel the cold of the floor seeping through it already. It was going to be miserable to sleep on. Kule had warned him that the Protectors thrived on discomfort, but knowing something and experiencing it were two separate things. With the sword, he could do anything. Without it, he was only human. His devotion to the Law would have to carry him through.

Ashok realized the barracks were too quiet. The other newly obligated acolytes were all staring at him. He studied their faces. Already they knew he wasn’t like them. He would never be like them. No matter how hard they trained, or how much courage they had in their hearts, or strength in their arms, they would never be his equal. So be it. The Law said that every man had a place. His house had declared his place to be here.

He stared back at the others. They were doing their best to hide their doubts and fears, but Ashok didn’t need to hide what he did not possess. They didn’t know what they were yet. He knew exactly what he was.

“Rest, brothers. Tomorrow we demonstrate our conviction to the Law.”

He lay back on his uncomfortable mat, knowing that he would show Master Ratul that he was worthy, and get his sword — and the rest of himself — back. While the others tossed and turned, longing for home or having nightmares, Ashok had no trouble sleeping at all.

 

THE DIVERGENCE BETWEEN POPULARITY AND AWARDS IN FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

Several people, in their commentaries on my recent essay (“Do We Really Have to Keep Feeding Stupid and His Cousin Ignoramus?”), challenged or at least questioned the assertion I’ve made several times in my various essays on the Hugo ruckus that the Hugos (and other major F&SF awards) have drifted away over the past thirty years from the tastes and opinions of the mass audience. It’s a fair question, so I’ll address it in this essay as best I can.

It’s not an easy issue to analyze, though. That’s for the simple reason that popularity is gauged by sales, and there are no publicly available records on the sales of various authors. That’s information which is privately held.

When I published my first essay on the Hugo ruckus a few months ago (“Some comments on the Hugos and other SF awards,” posted here on April 16), a number of people privately expressed their astonishment, or bemusement, or admiration at the amount of work I’d put into it. Or in the case of my publisher, Toni Weisskopf—although she never said a word to me about it—probably exasperation. (“What the hell is he doing writing this stuff instead of novels, dammit?”)

The essay does indeed represent a lot of work, since it’s 7,200 words long. (If word counts don’t mean much to you, that’s the length of two or three chapters in most novels.) But, in fact, I put very little work into it—this year. That’s because most of the essay had been written eight years earlier.

Here’s the history: Back in 2007, I wound up—I can’t remember how it got started—engaging in a long email exchange with Greg Benford over the subject of SF awards. Both of use had gotten a little exasperated over the situation—which is closely tied to the issue of how often different authors get reviewed in major F&SF magazines.

In the course of that discussion, I decided that being exasperated was pointless and that I should actually investigate the matter. Was it really true that the major awards (and major magazine reviews) had very little connection any longer to F&SF authors who were very popular? In my spare time—which is not copious, mind you—I delved into the matter over the next six months or so.

The essay I wound up posting this April is actually half as long as the essay I initially wrote back in 2007. That’s because I cut all the nitty-gritty empirical data I’d compiled to support my analysis because the drastic changes in publishing in the eight years that ensued made the analytical method I’d used obsolete. That doesn’t mean the analysis itself is obsolete, mind you. For reasons I’ll explain later I think nothing much has changed between 2007 and today.

But we’ll get to that. For the moment, I’m posting a chunk of the material I wrote eight years ago. Remember—what follows was written in 2007:

How in the world do you determine who the field’s “popular authors” are in the first place?

That’s a much trickier question than it looks, at first glance. On the one hand, almost anyone who regularly follows fantasy and science fiction has a fairly good sense of who the popular authors are. Or thinks they do, at least. But if you ask them to explain exactly why and on what basis they formed those conclusions, they will fumble for an answer. In the end, their explanation is likely to echo the famous comment by former Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart with regard to pornography, when he said that he found it very hard to define “but I know it when I see it.”

Likewise, most F&SF readers are well aware that authors like Raymond Feist or Mercedes Lackey or David Weber are “very popular.” But most of them would have a hard time explaining exactly why they “know” that.

The first thing we can eliminate as a possible basis for establishing who is and who is nor a popular author is the thing that would actually be the clearest defining criterion: sales themselves.

The problem is obvious. The figures are simply unavailable to the public. Occasionally, an author (or his or her publisher) might disclose that author’s sales, at least for a specific period. But, for the most part, that information is held privately and even then is not held in the same pair of hands. The only central authority you could go to in order to find out the sales of various authors is the Internal Revenue Service—and they won’t tell you. (Nor should they, of course.)

Still, it can be done, although we have to approach the matter indirectly. There’s no way for the audience as a whole or any individual person in it to determine what every author’s sales are. But what they can determine—each and every one of them who is inclined to do so, using very simple tools and methods—is which authors in the field can and do regularly maintain the greatest shelf space in bookstores.

That’s easy to do. Just trot down to your local Barnes & Noble or Borders with a tape measure or yardstick in hand. Then, go down the shelves, and record which authors have a full shelf of books available for sale. Let’s be a bit more precise and specify three feet of books on the shelves, since not all shelves are the same length. The general standard length for bookstore shelves is indeed about three feet—usually 34 or 35 inches, to be precise—but sometimes four foot shelves are used.

Having done that, repeat the same process in as many other bookstores as you can get to easily. And then repeat the process again if you travel elsewhere in the country, just to make sure you aren’t running into regional variations.

You can expand the search to include independent and specialty bookstores, but I’d recommend you keep it restricted to B&N and Borders. First, because for good or ill at least 75% of all sales of F&SF nowadays happens in B&N and Borders brick-and-mortar bookstores. (For all the publicity it gets, Amazon sales are still considerably less than 10% of the total.) Secondly, because there is a general consistency to B&N and Borders stock, just because they’re huge chains, and by and large their orders are determined by sales and nothing else—whereas what any independent bookstore might have on the shelves in the way of F&SF is notoriously fickle and subject to the whims of that store’s buyer.

You can also expand your investigation by making it more precise. Instead of just looking for “three-foot authors,” break your search down into more categories:

Authors who can regularly maintain four feet or more of books on the shelves, in most bookstores.

Authors who can regularly maintain three feet of books, in most bookstores.

Authors who can regularly maintain two feet of books, in most bookstores.

You can even extend it to those authors who maintain one foot of books, but what you’ll discover at this point is that you’re running into so many variables that it makes it hard to draw any general conclusions.

The general rule is this:

The more bookshelf space an author maintains, the more consistently they do so in bookstores across the country.

Those authors who maintain three or four feet of bookshelf space are almost always the very same ones, no matter what B&N or Borders bookstore you go into in any town in the country. Once you get down to two feet of shelf space, the situation starts to fluctuate. Some authors will be there very consistently—Robert Asprin or David Drake or Tad Williams, for instance—but others will come and go. And by the time you get down to one foot of shelf space, the fluctuation gets pretty extreme. An author might have eighteen inches of shelf space in one store and only a couple of copies in another. Or even none at all.

As crude as it is and with its inevitable distortions—which I’ll explain in a moment—the great and over-riding advantage of this measure-the-bookshelf-space method of determining the popularity of authors is that it’s objective and can be duplicated by anybody. You don’t have to take my word for it. If you don’t believe the results I’ll be presenting you with in the course of this essay, just grab a tape measure and go check for yourself—and you can do it in any town in the United States or Canada.

That said, there are certain distortions. There is no direct correlation between shelf space and actual sales, although there is obviously a lot of overlap.

Basically, what happens is that authors who are very popular but who don’t (comparatively, at least) write very much, get penalized. Unless a book reaches such phenomenal levels of popularity that bookstores order dozens of copies which they have stacked all over the floor—and that usually only happens for a short stretch of time—even a very popular title is going to have only so many copies on the shelves. The bookstores will usually keep just enough copies to make sure there’s always a copy available to the customers, but no more than that. And since the author only has a relatively small number of books available in the first place, they only wind up with so much shelf space.

On the opposite side, an author who sells very well but doesn’t have what you’d call really stellar sales—but is also very prolific—will have an advantage. Since each book they produce sells well enough that bookstores want to keep at least one or two copies on the shelves, and they often have dozens of titles available, they’ll wind up with a lot of shelf space.

So, to use one specific comparison, in almost any bookstore in the country you will discover that Mercedes Lackey has more shelf space than Robert Jordan. In fact, she usually has more shelf space than any author in our field. Lackey enjoys excellent sales, of course, but she’s never been in the stratosphere when it comes to sales the way that Robert Jordan has. The difference is that Jordan wrote only about a dozen books, and Lackey’s output is many times greater than that.

To a lesser degree, there’s probably also a distortion produced by the specific publishers for any given author. As a rule, the smaller independent presses like Baen Books and DAW will tend to keep an author’s books in print longer than most big corporate houses.

That said, the distortion only goes so far. In the nature of things, an author simply can’t regularly maintain three or four feet of bookshelf space in bookstores all over the country unless they’re very popular. And, on the flip side, even an author who writes very little will have a lot of shelf space if they’re popular enough. An example, as you’ll see in a moment, being J.R.R. Tolkien—who maintains as much shelf space as almost any author, despite the fact that there are only three main titles involved and a few less important ones.

As far as publishers go, that distinction can’t bear much weight either. As we’ll see in a moment, there are authors published through every major publishing house in the field who maintain a lot of shelf space in bookstores.

****

Okay, it’s time to start naming names.

There are exactly seven authors today [Note: remember, this was written in 2007] in fantasy and science fiction who, in hundreds of bookstores all across the country, can regularly maintain at least four feet of shelf space for the sale of their books:

    Jim Butcher
    Orson Scott Card
    Raymond Feist
    Mercedes Lackey
    Terry Pratchett
    J.R.R. Tolkien
    David Weber

I should make clear, by the way, that the reason I’m not including such very popular authors as J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or Laurel Hamilton is because they are not usually sold in the F&SF section. It’s the same reason I’m not including authors like Michael Crichton. You have to draw the line around “the field of F&SF” somewhere, and I think the simplest and clearest line is just to accept the judgment of major bookstores on the matter. (Yeah, sure, that’s philosophically crude as all hell—but, whether anyone likes it or not, it corresponds pretty well to practical reality.)

Go into any B&N or Borders bookstore anywhere in the United States and Canada and you will find these same seven fantasy and science fiction authors have at least four feet of shelf space, almost each and every time. You will also discover, in some of those bookstores, that one or two or possibly three authors in the next category (“three-footers”) also have four feet of shelf space. But that’s erratic, whereas it’s not erratic whether these seven authors will be there. They will be, almost always.

From the standpoint of measuring these authors in terms of awards received, of course, we have to start by subtracting J.R.R. Tolkien. He pretty much antedates the awards altogether. (Although he did receive a very belated Hugo nomination in 1966 for “best series ever.” But he was defeated by Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.)

Of the six remaining authors, four of them—Butcher, Feist, Lackey and Weber—have never received a single nomination in their entire careers for any major F&SF award. No Hugo nominations—forget wins, they’ve never even been nominated—no Nebulas, no World Fantasy Awards. Nothing.

Terry Pratchett has been nominated. Exactly twice. Once for the Hugo, once for the Nebula. He didn’t win either time.

With the last figure in the group, of course—Orson Scott Card—we find ourselves in the presence of a major award-winner. Card has been nominated for sixteen Hugo awards and won four times, and he was nominated for a Nebula on nine occasions and won twice. And he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award three times and won it once.

But…

He hasn’t been nominated for a WFC in twenty years, he hasn’t been nominated for a Nebula in eighteen years, and hasn’t been nominated for a Hugo in sixteen years. And he hasn’t won any major award (for a piece of fiction) in twenty years.

This is not because his career ended twenty years ago. To the contrary, Card continues to be one of our field’s active and popular authors. What’s really happened is that the ground shifted out from under him—not as far as the public is concerned, but as far as the in-crowds are concerned. So, what you’re really seeing with Orson Scott Card’s very impressive looking track record is mostly part of the archaeology of our field, not its current situation. As we’ll see in a moment, the situation is even more extreme with Anne McCaffrey and almost as bad with George R.R. Martin.

But first, let’s move on to look at the next category of authors. These are the ones I call “three-footers,” the authors who can regularly maintain a full shelf of books in most bookstores across the country.

There are fourteen of these authors, with a fifteenth now so close to entering their ranks—that’s Tanya Huff—that I think we should include her as well:

    Terry Brooks
    David Eddings
    Eric Flint
    Neil Gaiman
    Terry Goodkind
    Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson
    Robin Hobb
    Tanya Huff
    Robert Jordan
    George R.R. Martin
    Anne McCaffrey
    L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
    John Ringo
    R.A. Salvatore
    Harry Turtledove

Of those fifteen authors (counting Herbert and Anderson as a single author) eleven of them—that’s almost 75%—have never been nominated for any major award. Again, forget winning. These authors aren’t even on the radar.

Harry Turtledove has gotten some recognition: one WFC nomination; two Nebula nominations; and three Hugo nominations, one of which he won.

But, being blunt, six nominations and one win is a pretty screwy record for an author with Turtledove’s popularity, wide range of output, and longevity. Forty or fifty years ago—thirty years ago, for that matter—he would have been nominated at least as often as Gordon Dickson.

Anne McCaffrey has gotten quite a bit of recognition in her career, taken as a whole. She’s been nominated for a Hugo eight times and won once; and nominated for a Nebula on three occasions, of which she won once.

But she hasn’t been nominated for a Nebula in thirty-eight years and hasn’t won in thirty-nine years. And she hasn’t won a Hugo in forty years. The last time she was even nominated for a Hugo was sixteen years ago—and that was her only nomination for any major award in the last quarter of a century.

A quarter of a century, mind you, in which she kept writing and never once lost her popularity with the mass audience. But, as with Orson Scott Card, she long ago lost the favor of the in-crowds.

The situation’s a little better with George R.R. Martin. Martin, of course, has a very impressive track record when it comes to awards. He’s been nominated for a Hugo on seventeen occasions and won four times; nominated for a Nebula thirteen times and won twice; nominated for a WFC nine times and won once.

And, true enough, Martin did pick up some nominations recently, unlike Card or McCaffrey. Several of the novels in his very popular A Song of Ice and Fire series were nominated for Hugos and Nebulas in this century, although none of them won.

Still, even with Martin, most of his award history is now far in the past. Of the many nominations he’s gotten in his career, the great majority date back to the 70s and 80s, and most of them are now a quarter of a century old.

****

Here’s the truth. Of the twenty-two authors today whom the mass audience regularly encounters whenever they walk into a bookstore looking for fantasy and science fiction, because they are the ones whose sales enable them to maintain at least a full shelf of book space, only one of them—Neil Gaiman—also has an active reputation with the (very small) groups of people who vote for major awards.

And they are very small groups. Not more than a few hundred people in the case of the Hugos and Nebulas, and a small panel of judges in the case of the WFC.

With them, Neil Gaiman’s popularity hasn’t—yet, at least—eroded his welcome. He’s gotten five nominations and two wins for the Hugo; three nominations and two wins for the Nebula; eight nominations and one win for the WFC—and almost all of them came in this century.

But he’s the only one, out of twenty-two. In percentage terms, 4.5% of the total. (Or 4.8%, if we subtract Tolkien.)

There’s no way now to reconstruct exactly what the situation was forty years ago. But I know perfectly well—so does anyone my age (I’m sixty-one) with any familiarity with our genre—that if you’d checked bookstores in the 1960s and 1970s to see how shelf space correlated with awards, you’d have come up with radically different results. Instead of an overlap of less than five percent, you’d have found an overlap of at least sixty or seventy percent.

Nor does the situation get much better if you keep going “down” the list and look at those authors who maintain two feet of bookshelf space. A little bit better, but not much.

Here, you do get more fluctuation in the authors who show up, from one bookstore to the next, than you do with authors who maintain three or four feet of bookshelf space. Still, there are a number of authors who show up very regularly. Nine, in particular:

    Piers Anthony
    Robert Asprin
    Anne Bishop
    David Drake
    David Gemmell
    Charlaine Harris
    Dan Simmons
    S.M. Stirling
    Tad Williams

Of these nine authors, Simmons is the only one with a significant record when it comes to awards. In the course of his career, which has now lasted more than a quarter of a century, Simmons has gotten four Hugo nominations and one win; one Nebula nomination; and six nominations for the WFC of which he won two. And although most of those nominations date back fifteen years or more, at least one of them came in this century. His novel Ilium was nominated for a Hugo award in 2004.

Piers Anthony did pick up a few nominations in the course of his career, although he never won anything: four Hugos and one Nebula. But the last of those nominations came in 1970, almost forty years ago. So, again, we’re just dealing with archeology here.

The only other author in this group of nine who ever got any recognition of any kind in terms of awards was David Drake, and that was about as skimpy as it gets, given that he’s had one of the steadiest and most successful careers in the history of fantasy and science fiction. Drake was never nominated for either a Hugo or a Nebula, but he did receive two nominations for the World Fantasy Award. Both of those nominations, however, came in the 1970s, at the start of his career. Again, something of purely archeological interest.

The remaining six authors, two-thirds of the group, have never received any nominations for any major award in our field. And while it could be argued that Anne Bishop is still relatively early in her career, the same certainly can’t be said for the other five. And even Bishop has been a published author for well over a decade.

Two of these authors, in fact, no longer have careers at all. Both Bob Asprin and David Gemmell died recently—after, in the case of Asprin, a career that lasted thirty years and, in the case of Gemmell, a career that lasted twenty years. In both cases, quite successful careers.

Steve Stirling and Tad Williams have also been around for a long time. Stirling has been a published professional author for about a quarter of a century, most of that period working as a full time writer and quite a popular one. The same is true of Williams.

Before I break off my analysis of this group of “two-footers,” I need to discuss one important author who is something of an oddball because he’s one of the small number of authors who simply doesn’t fit well into this method of gauging popularity by the crude measure of bookshelf space.

That’s Neal Stephenson. The reason Stephenson is something of an oddball as far as shelf space is concerned is because he writes comparatively little, but what he does write tends to be very popular. So—as may be true with a few other authors, like Ursula LeGuin and Lois McMaster Bujold—it’s a little hard to correlate his popularity by using the method of measuring bookshelf space. Stephenson’s space will vary widely, from one bookstore to another, unlike most authors as popular as he is.

So, just to make sure we’re maintaining a proper balance, let’s include him in this group. Stephenson does occasionally get nominated for awards. He’s gotten two nominations and one win for the Hugo, and one nomination for the Nebula. All three nominations came within the past twelve years, too, so this is not archaeology.

****

All right. Let’s summarize the situation.

Including Neal Stephenson in this last group, and subtracting Tolkien, we’re looking at a total of thirty-one currently active authors. (Or, in the case of Asprin and Gemmell, authors who were active until very recently.) All thirty-one of these authors can regularly maintain at least two feet of bookshelf space in most bookstores in the country, and two-thirds of them can maintain three feet or more. And…

They’re the only ones who can. Other authors may be quite popular—that’s just impossible to determine directly—but, for whatever reason, they can’t maintain the same shelf space.

Of those thirty-one authors:

Only one of them gets nominated for awards regularly and frequently in the modern era: Neil Gaiman.

Only two of them—George R.R. Martin and Neal Stephenson—also get some nominations in the modern era. Martin’s very impressive record, however, is now mostly twenty years old or more.

Only two others have gotten any sort of award recognition in recent times—Harry Turtledove and Dan Simmons—and that’s not much.

Two others, Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card (especially Card) have very impressive career records, but those awards are now far back in the past.

And a couple of others have picked up a few awards, also far back in the past: David Drake and Piers Anthony.

The big majority, however, about 70% of them, have never gotten nominated—forget winning—for any major award in our field. This, despite the fact that almost no author in this group has a career that is less than ten years old. John Ringo and Jim Butcher are the two “youngest” authors in the group, measured in terms of length of career. (Not necessarily age, of course.) Both of them were first published in 2000, less than a decade ago.

The next “youngest,” depending on exactly how you look at it, is either me or Anne Bishop. Both of us first got published professionally in the mid-90s. To put it another way, both of us have been around for about fifteen years.

The point is, that with the possible exception of two of the authors, there are no spring chickens here. All of us except Ringo and Butcher have now had careers spanning well over a decade, and in the case of most of the authors, two or three decades—or even four or five decades, in some cases.

[Note by EF: what followed here was included in my essay published in April, 2015. I will resume with a section that I eliminated from the 4/15 essay:]

[T]he World Fantasy Award, which was supposedly set up a third of a century ago to counter-balance the presumed bias of the Hugo and the Nebula against fantasy, has an even worse track record than the Hugo and the Nebula when it comes to giving any recognition to popular fantasy authors.

    Consider the following—there is no other way to put it—ludicrous situation.

    The World Fantasy Award was launched in 1975. In the third of a century that has followed, the award has never so much as nominated the following fantasy authors:

    Terry Brooks
    Jim Butcher
    David Eddings
    Raymond Feist
    Terry Goodkind
    Robin Hobb
    Robert Jordan
    Mercedes Lackey
    R.A. Salvatore

Granted, Robin Hobb—when she was still writing as Megan Lindholm—got one nomination for a Hugo and three nominations for a Nebula. (Three of the four coming almost twenty years ago.) Granted also that Jim Butcher’s career is still comparatively new. But the point is that as soon as Lindholm became a major factor in shaping fantasy as Robin Hobb, she stopped getting any nominations.

Consider the above list, and then ask yourself a question:

What other authors, in the modern era, have done as much to shape the field of fantasy?

You’ll be able to name a few. But no matter how much you try to slide around it, you will be unable to avoid the simple objective fact that—at least as far as the millions of paying customers who sustain the field in the first place are concerned—those authors listed above have formed the field’s center of gravity for the past quarter of a century.

And yet not one of them has ever even been nominated for the award which claims to be the award specifically set aside to honor fantasy writing.

Okay, back to the modern world—meaning today, August 30, 2015. I will add to the above, by the way, that Terry Pratchett got only one nomination for the World Fantasy Award in his entire career—and that came back in 1991. He didn’t win.

Yes, yes, he was eventually given a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010, a few years before he died. But everyone knew perfectly well that was a very belated recognition that the award had screwed up for decades. That included Pratchett himself, whose letter of acceptance was blisteringly sarcastic—and ended with him insisting that the presenter of the letter give his signature as Sir Terry Pratchett. Thereby reminding the audience at the award presentation (I was there myself, as it happens)—rubbing their noses in it, rather—that the queen of England had figured out the reality before they had.

So, by then, had eight universities in the UK and Ireland, with two more to follow before his death (one of them in Australia).

Compare Pratchett’s immense popularity, a career that spanned four decades, a knighthood and honorary doctorates from ten—count ‘em, ten—universities to the awards he got from the F&SF community. Those came to the following:

Hugo: two nominations, one declined, no wins.

Nebula: two nominations, no wins.

WFA: one nomination, no wins.

Yes, yes, there was also the Word Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, but I am no more impressed by that than he was. They might as well have just called it the Oops, We Really Goofed Award.

Five nominations, total, from the three major F&SF awards, with no award actually given to him—and ten honorary doctorates and a knighthood. That, in a nutshell, captures the problem with the awards in the modern era. Even academicians and the queen of England have a better grasp of what really matters than it seems the people who vote for awards do.

There’s a reason for this, and it goes back to the issues I discussed in one of my earlier essays. (“TRYING TO KEEP LITERARY AWARDS FROM FAVORING LITERARY CRITERIA IS AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY. GET OVER IT.” Posted on June 16, 2014.) It is almost inevitable that as time passes, any sort of literary or artistic award will drift in the direction of contemplating the glory of trees rather than those of the forest. As the saying goes, they lose sight of the forest for the trees.

What does that mean, really? What it means is that literature—and F&SF is part of literature; the division into “genres” has no objective significance beyond marketing concerns—has many aspect to it. Some are what you might call purely literary, others are intertwined with a society’s culture taken as a whole.

I can perhaps best illustrate what I mean by recounting an anecdote from my impetuous youth. When I was a sophomore in college I got into a wrangle with one of my English literature professors. I advanced the proposition in a term paper that Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were now an integral part of English literature.

My professor disagreed very strongly. “How can you say that?” he demanded. The characters in the stories are one-dimensional, he argued. Furthermore, the issues taken up rarely if ever involve anything that really concerns—here, you could hear the capital letters—The Tragedy of the Human Condition. The stories are nothing but popular fiction aimed to titillate the masses.

I didn’t particularly disagree with any of the specific points he made. It is in fact true that the characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories are pretty one-dimensional. (Okay, call them two-dimensional if we include Holmes’ addiction to cocaine.) It is also true that the thematic issues the stories deal with are not particularly profound. And it is certainly true that the stories are popular fiction.

Wildly popular fiction, in fact. Which—this was the key, so far as I was concerned—had managed to retain that popularity for a century, with no sign that it was fading. (Nor did it. I got into this argument in 1966—forty years or so before the very popular Sherlock Holmes movies starring Edward Downey, Jr. and the equally popular TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch came out.)

And that, I argued, was ultimately what really mattered. Has a part of literature—no matter how limited it may be—become embedded in a society’s culture? If so, then it’s literature. Period.

If I’d left it at that, I probably would have suffered no penalty. My professor, despite his strong disagreement with my thesis, allowed that the essay was well-written and coherently argued. I’m sure his pen was poised to give me an “A” or at the very least a “B.”

Alas, I was a sophomore. My lip curled up in the way only nineteen-year-olds can manage a particularly insufferable sneer, and I added that so far as I could determine, my professor’s definition of “literature” seemed to be whatever author of the past was obscure enough in the modern world to make a suitable topic for a doctoral dissertation.

And… I got a C-minus in the course. I should have kept my mouth shut, I suppose, except…

It was such a nifty turn of phrase. Already I was clearly fated to become a scribbler.

To go back to the issue at hand, this is the inevitable tug-of-war that affects any literary or artistic award. Do we lean toward the tree or toward the forest? Do we focus on the way a story is written, or on the story itself?

That’s a simplistic way of putting it, granted, but it does capture the heart of the matter. What usually happens over time is that awards given out by a group of people who are a small sub-set of the mass audience for that particular form of literature or art tend to lean in the direction of contemplating the trees.

There’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. You just need to understand the phenomenon, not take it personally—and above all, not to characterize it as the product of foul play.

And that was the Original Sin, as it were, of the Sad Puppies. (The Rabid Puppies are a different phenomenon altogether.) As it happens, I agree with the sense the Sad Puppies have that the Hugo and other F&SF awards are skewed against purely story-telling skills.

They are. I’m sorry if some people don’t like to hear that, but there’s no other way you can explain the fact that—as of 2007; I’ll deal with today’s reality in a moment—only one (Neil Gaiman) of the thirty authors who dominated the shelf space in bookstores all over North America regularly got nominated for awards since the turn of the century.

The problem came with what the Sad Puppies did next. First, they insisted that Someone Must Be To Blame—when the phenomenon mostly involves objective factors. Secondly, being themselves mostly right wing in their political views, they jumped to the conclusion—based on the flimsiest evidence; mostly that some people had been nasty to Larry Correia on some panels at the Reno Worldcon—that the bias against their fiction in the awards was due to political persecution.

Neither proposition can stand up to scrutiny, as I have now demonstrated repeatedly in the course of these essays.

****

    All right, so much for the past. What about today? Is the analysis I made based on comparing bookshelf space still valid?

I believe it is, although I can’t prove it. That’s because of several factors:

First, the economic crisis in 2008 hammered the publishing industry in general. Publishing is normally rather impervious to the business cycle, but the 2008 crisis was so big it did have a major impact. All across the country, the bookshelf space enjoyed by most authors declined unless they were extremely popular.

Secondly, one of the two giant bookstore chains went out of business (Borders).

But, finally and most importantly, after 2007 the publishing industry began shifting more and more toward electronic publishing. To use myself as an example, more than 50% of the royalties from my latest novels comes from electronic sales.

Electronic sales are all but invisible to the public. And by the way, don’t think you can use Amazon sales rankings to determine anything. Unless you reach the stratosphere of sales rankings in the top few hundred titles, they don’t mean very much. Most of the fluctuation amounts to statistical noise.

That said, however, none of the developments in the publishing industry since 2007 should have changed much when it comes to the relative popularity of authors. If anything, in fact, the shift has probably been in the direction of a still greater chasm between popularity and awards. That’s because those authors who have been able to carve out very successful careers based on electronic self-publication—Amanda Hocking and Hugh Howey, to name two—are completely off the radar so far as the awards are concerned.

Granted, there’s also been movement that goes in the other direction. John Scalzi’s rise to prominence as a popular author, for instance, mostly postdates 2007, as did all but one of his Hugo nominations. And while Charles Stross started picking up nominations for Hugos as early as 2002, I don’t think his popularity started matching that until quite a bit later. I may be wrong about that, of course. I haven’t asked Charlie because it’s none of my damn business. But I think I’m right.

Still, no matter what shifts there might have been in either direction on the part of some authors, I see no reason to think that there’s been any sort of profound transformation of the reality as of 2007, when it comes to the match-up (or lack thereof) between sales and awards.

Keep in mind, furthermore, that my investigations based on measuring shelf space in bookstores focused almost entirely on novels—whereas the major F&SF awards are primarily oriented toward short fiction. That is a large part of what causes the disconnection between any given author’s popularity and her or his prominence when it comes to awards. For that small subset of the F&SF audience which does follow the awards, an author who wins a lot of Hugos or Nebulas or WFAs looms very large in their personal pantheon of who’s important and who isn’t. But unless those authors are winning awards for novels, they will be all but invisible to the mass audience because the market is oriented almost entirely toward novels.

People have an inevitable tendency to assume that authors who really matter to them also matter to many other people. Sometimes that’s true, but even when it is the reality tends to get exaggerated. That’s why I took the time, some years ago, to crosscheck my own assumptions against objective reality. As it happened, in that instance I discovered my assumptions were by and large valid. But the reason I expended the effort was because experience has taught me that you always need to do that. It’s the same reason I try never to criticize someone for saying or doing something unless I’ve double-checked to make sure my memory is accurate.

A lot of times it isn’t. There’s a natural tendency—I have it just as much as anyone else—to lapse into paraphrasing based on a predisposition. Thus someone knows—without bothering to double-check—that because someone else is a dirty rotten leftist (or rightist, or libertarian, or Mormon, or Catholic, or Scientologist—fill in the bête noire of your choice) they undoubtedly said or did X, Y or Z. But when and if they go to cross-check themselves, they often find they can’t actually substantiate the charge.

It’s the same way with things like assessing which authors are very popular and which ones aren’t. If people don’t take the time to double-check their assumptions, they’re very likely to misgauge the reality. That’s especially true because we’re dealing with a continuum here. It’s not as if the world is divided between Bestselling Authors and Can’t-Sell-Anything Auteurs. Any number of authors who win a lot of awards sell quite well. But it’s just a fact that most of them don’t have the kind of sales that dominate the genre when it comes to popularity.

****

    I apologize for the length of this essay, but the questions and objections raised to my assertion that there’s a big difference (with some overlap) between what the mass audience thinks and what the much smaller awards-voting crowd thinks is an important and valid one. And so I thought it was necessary to take the time to address the matter thoroughly and explain the source of my claim.

One more thing needs to be said. The biggest problem in all of this is that way, way too many people—authors and awards-bestowers alike—have a view of this issue which… ah…

I’m trying to figure out a polite way of saying they have their heads up their asses…

Okay, I’ll say it this way. The problem is that way too many people approach this issue subjectively and emotionally rather than using their brains. With some authors, regardless of what they say in public, there’s a nasty little imp somewhere deep in the inner recesses of their scribbler’s soul that chitters at them that if they’re not winning awards there’s either something wrong with them or they’re being robbed by miscreants. Or, if they don’t sell particularly well but do get recognition when it comes to awards, there’s a peevish little gremlin whining that they’re not selling well either because somebody—publisher, agent, editor, whoever except it’s not them—is not doing their job or it’s because the reading public are a pack of morons.

Everybody needs to take a deep breath and relax. There are many factors that affect any author’s career and shape how well they sell and how often they get nominated for awards. Some of these factors are under an author’s control, but a lot of them aren’t. And, finally, there’s an inescapable element of chance involved in all of this.

The only intelligent thing for an author to do is, first, not take anything that happens (for good or ill) personally; secondly, try to build your career based on your strengths rather than fretting over your weaknesses.

And, thirdly, always remember that in the final analysis there are only two awards that really matter:

Are you enjoying yourself?

Are people still reading something of yours fifty years after you died?

You’ll never know the answer to that second question, of course. All the more reason to center your career and your life on the first one.

 

Son Of The Black Sword – Snippet 18

Son Of The Black Sword – Snippet 18

Chapter 8

Twenty years ago

As the richest, most powerful house, Vadal was the last to be announced during the induction ceremony. Aunt Bidaya had prepared Ashok for this by explaining that it was all politics. Vadal could afford to wait. It tells our rivals that we saved the best for last.

Ashok found the Protectors’ audience chamber to be surprisingly humble. Perhaps it was because he was used to the beauty of Vadal holdings that he connoted power with opulence. Except the Protectors were powerful and their audience chamber had less decoration than a Vadal horse stable. The simple room was crowded with representatives of every great house and their candidates for obligation. Everyone was dressed in furs or thick robes and their breath could be seen in the air. The windows were open. The ceremonial chamber wasn’t heated. It wasn’t as if a militant order with the blessing of the Inquisition couldn’t afford to run the furnace. It was the Protectors’ way of telling their guests that they didn’t give a damn about anyone’s comfort.

The representative from house Vokkan finished his long description of his charge’s exploits, accomplishments, and championships. The oldest was only thirteen years old, so he couldn’t have done that much, but that was the game. The tales were surely exaggerated, but this part was all about trying to outdo the other houses. Whoever gave the most valuable obligations would be able to brag about it in the courts.

Ashok didn’t understand these games that his aunt spoke about, but he understood honor, duty, and the Law. Each of those things demanded that he be here now.

The Protector in charge of the ceremony walked in front of the kneeling young men, inspecting them. Once satisfied, he made a mark on his scroll. “The Order thanks Great House Vokkan for their generous obligation of seven sons of the warrior caste and one son of the first caste.” He sounded bored. “They will proceed to testing.”

Despite the Order’s power, the Protectors of the Law were few in number. A single master was presiding. His witnesses were a senior and a few other acolytes, barely older than the boys who were being obligated. While the presenters and their charges had decorated their winter clothing with ornaments, jewelry, and silks dyed the colors of their houses, the Protectors were dressed in drab cloaks, fit for workers. The master checked his list again as he moved to the end of the line. “Great House Vadal has brought…A single candidate? Your lady must not be aware of our failure rate.”

The other presenters were curious. The dumb ones found that amusing. The smart ones realized that Vadal was up to something. The master stopped before the small Vadal contingent. He stood there for a while in the cold winter sun, taking his time. Ashok kept his back straight and his eyes fixed on a crack in the wall as the old man studied him. “Present your obligation.”

The other presenters were arbiters and other courtly types. Ashok was the only one being introduced by a wizard. Kule was a small, quiet, odd-looking fellow. He stepped out of line and cleared his throat before speaking. “On behalf of Bidaya, Thakoor of Great House Vadal, as per our contract I obligate to the Order of Protectors the second son of deceased Jayesh of the first caste, who was once arbiter of Goda Province. Here is Ashok, aged ten years.”

“A single candidate, and the youngest one here…This will end well,” the Protector muttered. Everyone heard that, and there was a bit of laughter. Ashok kept his gaze fixed on a distant point and showed no emotion, just as he’d been taught. “What are his accomplishments?”

The other candidates had gotten long litanies of achievements. Ashok’s was brief. “He is the chosen bearer of mighty Angruvadal.” Kule finished his pronouncement and returned to his place in line.

The snickering died. Nervous whispers immediately rose among the other house’s presenters. Angruvadal? Several of them broke protocol by turning their heads to try and catch a glimpse of the sword sheathed at the boy’s side. All they would be able to see was that it appeared to be far too long for him to wield it worth a damn. They would be incorrect.

“What?” the old Protector glanced at the wizard, then at Ashok, then at his list, and back at the wizard. “House Vadal is obligating the bearer of its ancestor blade?”

“You are correct, Lord Protector.” Kule bowed respectfully. “Which is why we believe just the one will be sufficient.”

The other nervous young men who were being obligated to the Order kept their eyes forward. Ashok remained kneeling, motionless as the rest. He had been instructed not to move until told to move, nor to speak unless spoken to. He was mostly motionless, except for the shivering. That couldn’t be controlled. The headquarters of the Protector Order, like most important things, was in the Capitol, but its training program was in the barren mountains of Devakula, so all of the boys from the warmer northern houses were having a difficult time. The annual ceremony was held during the winter, probably because any children who died along the hard journey through the passes saved the Protectors the effort of having to weed out the weak later.

The Protector’s mood changed from bored to angry very quickly. He’d probably had some small speech prepared, but it had been forgotten once he’d learned someone had brought something so deadly into his castle. “The ceremony is concluded. The presenters will be escorted out. The obligated will be shown to their quarters. Except for the Vadal delegation. You stay here.”

The other houses complied, the boys looking nervous or happy to have made it this far, while their political masters seemed frustrated or curious by this new development. The senior ushered everyone else out, and soon it was only the master, the wizard, and Ashok who remained in the giant, freezing room.

“What is Vadal playing at, wizard?”

Kule smiled, showing his oddly pointed teeth. “There is no game here, Lord Protector, merely a demonstration of our house’s extreme devotion to the Law. All of the details are in the contract which was presented to your representatives in the Capitol. It has already been approved by the judges. All that remains is for you to accept the obligation of this child as acceptable. All that we have asked in return is that should Ashok perish, the sword be returned to its rightful house so that it may choose a new bearer.”

“Stand up!” the Protector shouted.

Ashok leapt to his feet. The Protector circled him, eyeing the sword sheathed on his belt. The handle and guard were dark and unremarkable.

“Draw the sword.”

He did as he was told. Three feet of black steel was freed from the leather. Angruvadal wanted to know who it was supposed to cut. No one yet. Be still. When the sword came out, his shivering ceased. He held it out with one hand, horizontal to the floor, careful not to take up any sort of fighting stance so that Angruvadal would not get the wrong idea.

Angruvadal was shaped like a typical sword of House Vadal. Most likely, they were based on it. Unlike most swords in Lok, Angruvadal was straight, not curved in any way. It was double-edged, sharp enough on either side to effortlessly lop off a man’s arm. The grip was long enough for two hand use. Though the pommel, grip, and guard didn’t give off the same eye-searing glow as the blade itself, they weren’t separate pieces, but seemed to have grown organically from the whole. For something so valuable, there was absolutely no ornamentation to it at all — not that there was any way to decorate Angruvadal, since it was made out of a material that couldn’t even be scratched.

Most people were afraid to come too close to the blade because they’d heard the stories, but not the Protector. He loomed over Ashok and demanded, “Hold it up toward the lantern so I can see.” Ashok did so, and they both watched it devour the flickering light.

“It is truly one of the most dangerous things in the entire world,” Kule warned.

“It burns the eye to look directly at it,” the Protector whispered as he stared into the blade. “It is said that a warrior with one of these can break an army by himself.”

“History has repeatedly demonstrated that to be true.” Kule had hunkered back down into his coat to hide from the chill, nearly disappearing until only his tiny black eyes poked out over the fur. “It can slay demons as if they are normal flesh and bone. Lawbreakers will tremble before its wrath. Imagine what the Order could do with such a tool. And now it is yours to direct…for the good of the Law, of course.”

The Protector realized that he’d been drawn in until his breath was steaming on the sword. He was so close that Ashok could remove the top half of his head with the flick of a wrist. A man could lose himself staring into that abyss. He stepped back. “Sheath it. Now.”

Angruvadal felt disappointment at being put away.

The other Protectors had returned from shooing out the presenters. They were watching as well, seemingly just as fascinated as their master. “Is it true?” the senior asked.

“It’s the real thing, and it didn’t take his life for daring to pull it, so we can assume this is no fraud,” the master said.

“Imagine what we could accomplish with a bearer in our ranks,” the senior said.

“Answer my questions carefully, boy. Answer them as if your life depends on it, because it truly does.”

 

A Call To Arms – Snippet 19

A Call To Arms – Snippet 19

CHAPTER TWELVE

Manticore had come and gone, and was no more than a faint dot in the Izbica’s aft viewer.

And Captain Shresthra, in the quaint old vernacular, was not a Happy Camper.

“You said there would be bales and bales of cargo to be had at Manticore,” he grumbled yet again to Grimm, punctuating his rant with an accusing finger. “You remember? That was exactly what you said: bales and bales.”

“I know,” Grimm said in as apologetic a voice as he could muster. It wasn’t easy, when what he really wanted to do was take hold of that jabbing finger and break it off. Patience, he reminded himself firmly. “But that really was how things worked eight years ago, when I last passed through this region. There was no way I could have known that freighter traffic had picked up so much since then.”

Shresthra gave a contemptuous sniff. “A dozen or so ships a year hardly qualifies as traffic, Mr. Grimm. At the very least you should have asked the Havenite freighter at Casca whether he and the other freighters had this route sewed up. If I’d known, we could have gone directly to Minorca instead of wasting three weeks with this side trip.”

“I know,” Grimm said again, doing his best verbal grovel in front of the annoying little man. In fact, he had talked to the Havenites, learned that Manticoran trade was indeed well covered, and had been careful to leave them with the impression that he would pass on any relevant information to the Izbica’s captain and crew. The visit to Manticore was the whole reason Grimm and his partners were aboard; the last thing he’d wanted was for Shresthra to bypass the system.

Just as the last thing he wanted right now was for Shresthra to make a stink that would force him to kill the little man and his crew. They were still close enough to the planet — and more than close enough to the ships plying the route between Manticore and Sphinx — that there might still be some need for communication. There was nothing like an abrupt switch to a new and unfamiliar voice to make people curious.

“But there is also the planet Gryphon,” he continued, gesturing outward. “Not to mention all the Manticore-B mining operations. We could make a quick microjump over there, send out a query to the mining factories, and see if they’ve got some product they want to sell.”

“No,” Shresthra said firmly. “The Star Kingdom had their chance. We hit the hyper limit, we’re heading straight to Minorca.”

Damn. “Certainly, if that’s what you want,” Grimm said. “I was just trying to salvage something useful from this trip.”

“You want to salvage something, salvage your breath next time you have a bright idea,” Shresthra growled. Grabbing a handhold, he spun himself around in midair and gave himself a pull toward the bridge.

Grimm waited until he’d floated out of sight. Then, glowering, he headed back to the hold.

Bettor was floating in front of the analyzer, watching as it ran the latest batch of data though its electronic hoops. “Well?” he asked.

“We’re going to Minorca,” Grimm told him. “Do we care?”

“Afraid we do,” Bettor said. “Rough estimate is that we’ll need ten to twelve more hours than we’re going to get if we leave on the Izbica’s current schedule.”

“Twelve?” Grimm echoed, frowning. “I thought it was only six at the most.”

“That was before Shresthra had Pickers goose a few more gravs out of the impellers,” Bettor said. “The man’s serious about trying to get back on schedule.” He raised his eyebrows. “Time to let loose the Merripens of war?”

Grimm pursed his lips, seriously tempted. But his earlier concern about changing personnel in possible future communications was still valid. “Not yet,” he said. “I’ve already gimmicked the interface with the hyperdrive. That should buy us the rest of the time you need. Once you’re finished, I’ll find the magic fix, and Shresthra can make course for wherever he wants.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Bettor agreed. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t figure it out.”

“He won’t,” Grimm said. “We’ve introduced enough glitches on this trip for him to put it down to yet another bit of balky equipment.”

“If you say so,” Bettor said. “Just be ready if he isn’t as naïve as you expect.”

“Don’t worry,” Grimm said. “I’ll be as ready as Merripen is.”

“And Merripen’s always ready?”

Grimm smiled grimly. “Yes. Always.”

* * *

“This is a drill,” Captain Castillo’s voice boomed across Phoenix’s intercom system. “General Quarters, General Quarters. Set Condition Two throughout the ship. Repeat: set Condition Two throughout the ship. This is a drill.”

Travis was the second of his crew to reach their station in Forward Weapons, right after Spacer Second Skorsky. The rest of them were no more than two minutes behind him. Luckily for them.

Two minutes and twelve seconds after that, the missiles, beam weapon, and all of the functional support equipment showed green.

“Nice,” Fornier commented, checking his chrono. “I make that as a hair under an eight percent improvement. Excellent work, Lieutenant Long. At this rate, you’ll be dropping that awkward jay-gee from your rank within a couple of months.”

“Thank you, Sir,” Travis said, scowling a little to himself. That eight percent might look good on paper, but the bottom-line fact was that the improvement was mainly due to Phoenix now being down to a single forward tracking sensor, several major components of the second system having been cannibalized to fix the balky EW assembler.

And it took zero time to bring up, check, and confirm a system that wasn’t working in the first place.

All of which Fornier knew, of course. But like everyone else in the Navy, he’d learned how to put good spin on anything capable of being spun.

“Sounds like the aft autocannon’s still coming up,” Fornier continued, cocking his ear toward the commentary stream coming from the intercom. “Let’s try giving the tracker something to track.”

“Yes, Sir,” Travis said. Grabbing a handhold, he gave himself a pull and floated over to the main display.

As usual, there wasn’t much out there. There were three contacts showing in the inner Manticore-A system — a couple of local transports, plus HMS Salamander, out on some kind of training cruise.

And between Salamander and the transports was a single contact: the Solarian freighter Izbica, heading out from her cargo-hunt on Manticore.

She would do nicely.

“Give me a track on bogey bearing one-four-six by two-two-nine,” he called toward his crew.

“A track, Sir?” Skorsky asked, sounding confused. “Sir, she’s way out of range for that.”

“She’s out of range for radar and lidar, yes,” Fornier said with an edge of deliberate patience. “They’re also blocked by the aft quarter of the dorsal wedge. So what else have you got?”

“Gravitics, Sir,” Skorsky said, belatedly catching up. “Yes, Sir. Tracking via gravitics.”

“And don’t think this is just make-work,” Fornier added, raising his voice so the whole compartment could hear. “Yes, tracking is usually CIC’s or the bridge’s job. But there might be a time down the road when communications get cut off, and you’re on your own.”

“Understood, Sir,” Skorsky said briskly. “Track plotted and on the board.”

Travis craned his neck to look at the display. Izbica’s position and a rough estimate of her vector were now displayed, within the limits of the gravitic data for something that far away. He ran his eye down the numbers…

And frowned.

“Confirm position,” he ordered.

“Confirm position, aye.

“Trouble?” Fornier asked quietly from behind him.

“I don’t know,” Travis said. “Look where she is.”

“Outside the hyper limit,” Fornier murmured.

“Considerably outside the hyper limit,” Travis agreed. “A good three hundred thousand kilometers, and she hasn’t made her alpha translation yet. She’s not accelerating, either.”

“She does seem to be just coasting,” Fornier agreed. “You think she’s in trouble?”

“Could be,” Travis said. In the back of his mind, he could hear the echo of Chomps’s voice as he laid out his theory about the Cascan mass-murderer being aboard the freighter. Could he have been right?

No. The theory had been ridiculous. And even if it hadn’t been, that could hardly have anything to do with this current situation. The last thing a killer on the lam would want was to draw attention to himself by fiddling with his ship’s operation. Especially not this close to an inhabited system.

But while Travis might not know much about freighters, he did know that they lived by their schedules. No captain would waste time doodling along past the hyper limit unless he didn’t have a choice.

 

Raising Caine – Snippet 19

Raising Caine – Snippet 19

Riordan suppressed a sigh. “I understand that, Ms. Veriden. But I don’t understand your attitude. You’re part of the legation, and I’m concerned with your welfare, both professional and personal. That’s all.” He gestured toward a seat as he resumed his own.

Dora ignored the gesture. “Look, I don’t need your personal concern. And professionally, the only person who has any reason, or right, to inquire after my status is my employer: Ambassador Gaspard.”

Riordan shook his head. “That’s not quite accurate, Ms. Veriden. He is certainly the only person who can give you security-related directives.” Which is a bad arrangement, but that’s a different topic. “However, as a member of this legation, your moment-to-moment personal safety is my responsibility. Whether you like it or not.”

“Not,” Dora answered. And finally took a seat.

Well, I’ve got to give her points for bluntness. “Ms. Veriden, while I’d have been glad for you to stop by on your own initiative, I doubt that’s what brought you here.”

Veriden nodded. “Yeah. Gaspard sent me.”

Caine waited. He didn’t want to make Dora any more uncomfortable than she had to be, but on the other hand, she tended to nip and snarl when others initiated conversation. Better to let her proceed in whatever manner she chose.

She looked Riordan in the eye. “That animal came at me because I didn’t put on the biomarkers.”

Bannor leaned forward sharply. “What?”

She leaned right back at him. “Are you deaf? I said I didn’t put on the markers.”

Bannor’s posture did not change, but his color did; flushing, Rulaine’s jaw muscles clenched as he struggled to suppress a presumably blistering reply —

“Ms. Veriden.” Riordan kept his voice professional, but sharp. “I assure you, Major Rulaine’s hearing is unimpaired. You may not be a part of my security team, but I will insist upon a modicum of respect when you interact with its members. Now: why didn’t you apply the protective biomarkers?”

“I — I thought it would be best if one of us didn’t.”

Caine leaned back, considered. The tone of her voice suggested that the explanation wasn’t a complete fabrication, but he could tell it wasn’t the whole truth, either. But right now, he had a concrete explanation, and that was enough to start with. “Why did you think it prudent that one of the legation remain unmarked?”

She looked at Caine quizzically. “You really want to know?”

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t ask.”

She stared at him sidelong for a moment before replying. “Okay. So, these Slaasriithi seem to have reversed the importance of machinery and biology. That makes me wonder: shouldn’t we be as careful of their sprays and markers and gifts as they should be of accepting our bugged ID badges and presents? How would we know if they’re marking us for their own purposes? And how can we be sure that they won’t include biochemicals that can be used to influence or control us?”

Hwang was shaking his head, but Caine jumped in before he could start enumerating the many ways in which this was unlikely or impossible. “Ms. Veriden, I admire your attention to our more subtle security challenges. Be assured, the same thoughts have occurred to us.”

She was surprised by that response but rallied rapidly and went on the offensive: “Yeah? Then why didn’t you spray your container on the ground when no one was looking?”

Caine smiled. “Firstly, I was in the front rank. It’s not as though I had the opportunity to do so surreptitiously. But the real reason is this: have you also considered that part of our legation’s role is to function like a canary in a coal mine?”

Dora Veriden’s mouth closed and then opened; she spent a moment waiting for a retort that never materialized. “No,” she said flatly. “I’m not even sure what you mean.” Hwang and Bannor looked equally flummoxed.

Riordan steepled his fingers. “Ms. Veriden, it seems you’ve spent most of your life on the sharp end, so this won’t be news to you: any probe into a new area is somewhat like a recon mission. The main objective is to get in, look around, then return to report. But even if the mission is lost, even if it disappears without a trace, that’s still valuable intel. It warns the people who sent the recon team that the region is not completely safe and that any further entry should be handled with caution. And if even a few survivors make it back? More valuable still: not only can you debrief them, but scan them for pathogens, nanytes, any other contaminants or suspicious substances.”

Riordan leaned forward. “We’re a diplomatic mission, Ms. Veriden, but we’re also performing that recon function. Part of our job is to take risks, to gather information, even if it means making ourselves vulnerable to possible ploys and bugs and viruses by which our hosts might influence us. Because when we get back home, we’ll be quarantined and examined like few humans ever have been. Consequently, our apparently uncritical trust in our hosts is not a sign of incompetence. So, in the future, when our diplomatic host makes a request of the entire legation, you will do two things.”

Dora’s jaw set. “And those are?”

“You will inform me if you intend not to follow that request, and you will get express permission from Ambassador Gaspard before you refuse to do so, which he will relay to me. Because he is the head of our legation, and because you are his personal employee, you alone of all persons even have that right. But you will keep us in the loop.” Because you sure as hell didn’t clear today’s noncompliance with Gaspard first, or he’d never have ordered you to come talk to me like a truant child being sent to the principle’s office. Which he surely knows is worse than any other punitive action or reprimand he could impose on you.

Veriden’s teeth might have been clenched as she muttered, “Agreed.” She rose to leave.

“Ms. Veriden, one other matter.”

She turned back toward Riordan. “Yes?”

“I’d like to combine your professional efforts with those of my team, when and if the ambassador permits it and circumstances dispose you to be willing to do so. This legation will be strongest when all its security assets are pulling in the same direction.”

Her expression was equal parts incredulous and amused. “Are you serious?”

“You might say I’m deadly serious, Ms. Veriden, since it is our shared responsibility to deal with matters of life and death. And frankly, I know high ability and intelligence when I see them.”

She folded her arms. “You’ve probably figured out that I’m not much of a team player. And I don’t much like taking orders.”

“I’ve noticed. I also observe that you do take orders even if you don’t enjoy it, and that you have skills which make you a valuable addition to any team, even if you are mostly working on your own.”

Veriden opened the door, paused on the threshold. Her mumbled response sounded more like a confession. “I’ll think about it.”

Once the door closed behind her, Bannor shook his head. “Caine, you’re the boss — but her? Really?”

“She’s difficult, yes. But she’s damned good.” Bannor rubbed his chin briskly. Caine had learned what that gesture meant: the ex-Green Beanie didn’t want to be subordinate, but there was something he really wanted to say. “You’re worried about something besides her sunny disposition?”

“Yeah,” Rulaine admitted. “Gaspard’s assistant Dieter got nervous and talkative after today’s mishap with the local wildlife. Seems this isn’t the first time that Ms. Veriden went off cowboying on her own and became an embarrassment to her employer.”

“By ruining another operation that got in the way of her own special brand of problem-solving?”

“Oh, that too, but I was thinking more about her political, er, forthrightness.”

Caine nodded. “Go on.”

“One of the reasons she never finished college or even a certificate program was because she always took the administration to task and made herself persona non grata in record time. Maintained a few vlogs — some directly, some via aliases — that are about as inflammatory as you can get before becoming a ‘person of interest’ to security agencies.”

“Whose security agencies, specifically?”

“Take your pick. She’s pretty much an equal-opportunity anarchist.”

Hwang’s eyebrows went high. “She’s a genuine anarchist?”

Rulaine waved a dismissive hand. “A figure of speech, but apt. Can’t find a single bloc or nation that she trusts or is even considers acceptable. All her sympathies are with resistance movements, underground organizations, and what activists dub ‘post-national collectives.’ And you know what that means.”

Hwang looked from Bannor to Caine and back to Bannor. “Well, I don’t know what that means. So please add a caption.”

Rulaine shrugged. “The megacorporations have a long history of mining anti-government organizations for support. They throw a lot of money at them: sometimes directly, sometimes through plausibly deniable proxies.”

Hwang screwed up his face. “And do these groups really join forces with the megacorporations? They’re far more autocratic than nation-states.”

Caine shook his head. “It’s not a direct alliance. But the megas aren’t really looking for co-combatants against ‘the tyranny of nations.’ They’re just funding grass-roots resistance to national authority.” He turned back toward Bannor. “But do you really think Dora’s been a megacorporation’s agent provocateur?”

Rulaine shrugged. “No way to know. Dieter tells me that Gaspard has complained to DGSE that even her classified dossier is threadbare. Lots of gaps in her timeline. Lots of arrows pointing to sealed case-files and intelligence summaries.”

Ben Hwang’s palmcomp buzzed. He glanced at it, rolled his eyes. “The Great Man has summoned the two of us. He wants that classified summary he put off.”

“And he wants it right now, I’ll bet.”

“No. He wants it an hour ago. When should I tell him we’ll be there?”

“An hour ago,” Caine sighed. “Let’s go.”