Reality and Other Fictions

By Jeffrey A. Carver

Five science fiction stories to ignite the imagination. Explore an Earth being devoured by entropy, in the ultimate runaway environmental crisis. Dive the depths of the sea to prevent the mother of all oil spills. Rocket into space as a tourist. Mine the asteroids with your enhanced border collie, in the can-do spirit of classic science fiction. These stories appeared in publications as varied as Science Fiction Age, F&SF, and the Boston Sunday Herald. They include Carver's first published short fiction, and his most recent. With new introductions, all from the author of The Chaos Chronicles and Eternity's End.

Contents:
Reality School: In the Entropy Zone
Of No Return
Seastate Zero
Rocket Ride!
Dog Star

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeffrey A. Carver
• Release date: Jun 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476215150

Jeffrey A. Carver

Jeffrey A. Carver was a Nebula Award finalist for his novel Eternity's End. He also authored Battlestar Galactica, a novelization of the critically acclaimed television miniseries. His novels combine thought-provoking characters with engaging storytelling, and range from the adventures of the Star Rigger universe (Star Rigger's Way, Dragons in the Stars, and others) to the ongoing, character-driven hard SF of The Chaos Chronicles—which begins with Neptune Crossing and continues with Strange Attractors, The Infinite Sea, Sunborn, and now The Reefs of Time and its conclusion, Crucible of Time.A native of Huron, Ohio, Carver lives with his family in the Boston area. He has taught writing in a variety of settings, from educational television to conferences for young writers to MIT, as well as his ongoing Ultimate Science Fiction Workshop with Craig Shaw Gardner. He has created a free web site for aspiring authors of all ages at http://www.writesf.com.For a complete guide to Jeffrey A. Carver's ebooks, visit:https://www.starrigger.net

Book preview

Reality and Other Fictions

five science fiction stories

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Jeffrey A. Carver

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Copyright Information

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

REALITY AND OTHER FICTIONS

Copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey A. Carver

A Starstream Publications Ebook

Discover other ebooks by Jeffrey A. Carver at

www.starrigger.net/ebooks.htm

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Original Publication

Reality School: In the Entropy Zone first appeared in Science Fiction Age, March 1995. Copyright © 1995 Jeffrey A. Carver.

Of No Return first appeared in Fiction Magazine. Copyright 1974 © Jeffrey A. Carver.

Seastate Zero first appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1978. Copyright © 1977 Jeffrey A. Carver.

Rocket Ride! A Short Day's Journey into Space first appeared in The Boston Herald Sunday edition, on March 7, 2004. Copyright © 2004 Jeffrey A. Carver.

Dog Star first appeared in Diamonds in the Sky, edited by Mike Brotherton and published online at www.mikebrotherton.com/diamonds/. Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey A. Carver.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

* * *

Reality School: In the Entropy Zone

Of No Return

Seastate Zero

Rocket Ride

Dog Star

* * *

About the Author

Introduction

Welcome to Reality and Other Fictions, the long-awaited story collection! Long-awaited by me, anyway. For years, I've wanted to gather my widely scattered short stories into a book, or books. The time has never seemed right, and as the years passed, story collections have somewhat fallen into disfavor with traditional publishers, because they tend not to sell as well as novels. The new reality of indie publishing, however, has changed that; it's now possible for an author to take matters into his own hands and do for himself what the publishing industry can't or won't do. Just as I have brought my previously published novels back into circulation via ebooks, now I can do the same with my short fiction.

I've never done a lot of short story writing. My early efforts, which account for the fat folder of rejections slips in my file drawer, were all shorts. My first couple of professional sales were shorts. At the time, I figured I'd keep writing short stories until I had a track record, and then try the transition to novels. Something unexpected happened, though. While I was in the process of trying to sell my third short story, a rejection of the story came with an offer for a contract to write my first novel! Are you kidding? I pondered the question for about half a second, then seized the chance. From that came Seas of Ernathe and a career largely focused on novels.

Short stories became something I wrote once in a while, when I had an idea that grabbed me, or in response to a particular invitation or opportunity. I liked short stories, but they took so long to write, and were so unpredictable to sell! Working out a short story idea was often as hard as working out one for a novel. And writing short, you know, is hard. Over the years, I wrote and sold sixteen novels . . . and eleven short stories. I sold them to Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction and Science Fiction Age, and several anthologies. But I never sold twice to the same market. In fact, most of the magazines I sold to went out of business not long after they published me. Connection? I hope not!

I've decided to gather them all into two ebook collections. All the ones involving aliens will appear in a second collection, Going Alien. All the rest are here. When reading my earlier work, I'm always tempted to fiddle and rewrite. Unlike a certain famous science fiction filmmaker, I've resisted the temptation. Beyond correcting some punctuation and typographical errors, and one or two injudicious edits made by others, I'm presenting the stories as they were originally published.

They're pretty varied. And none of them is very much like my novels. If you've read my novels, I hope you'll enjoy the change of pace. And if you haven't read my novels, I hope they'll make you wonder what you're waiting for!

—Jeffrey A. Carver, June 2012

P.S. This book is dedicated to my many housemates of years gone by, who tolerated my strange hours and ways as I stumbled toward a career as a professional writer. Thanks, all of you!

Reality School:

In the Entropy Zone

Behind the story:

The mind plays funny tricks. Like most writers, I try to capitalize on the tricks my own mind plays. One day in 1994, I was paging through the newspaper (back then, I still read the newspaper on paper), and my gaze fell on a tiny ad near the bottom of the back page. The ad was a come-on for classes in selling real estate. Its headline: Realty School.

Only that's not what I read. I read it as an ad for reality school. After a moment I saw my mistake, but my mind seized on the misreading and began spinning in the background, asking questions. Reality school. What would you teach at a reality school? Would adults go to it, or kids? Did the name imply that reality might break down, and require someone to maintain it? Before long, I remembered an unfinished story fragment I had shut away in a drawer, something I'd noodled around with years before and never gotten a handle on. I dug it out of the files, and when I looked through it I realized two things: One, it had some elements that fit with the thing slowly forming in the back of my mind. And two, there was a reason I'd never finished it. I didn't have a story yet, just some interesting details.

As I mentioned earlier, short fiction tends to take me an inordinately long time to write, and this story was no exception. I worked on it for months, had it rejected by some desirable markets, and took it apart and worked on it some more. The revised version appealed to Scott Edelman, then editor at Science Fiction Age magazine, and it ran in the March 1995 issue.

It's one of my personal favorites. It's also quite different from just about anything else I've written. I hope you enjoy Reality School: In the Entropy Zone.

_______________

As we walk through the entropic boundary, I expect to feel . . . I don't know what . . . some startling physical sensation. Instead, it's more like walking into the shadow of a towering building. A draft of cooler air passes through my blouse.

Then everything changes . . .

*

Looking back, it seems almost impossible to believe. Reality School, from matriculation to retirement, was supposed to fill seven of my best years—years of learning and challenge, and perhaps even occasionally danger. The time I actually spent cannot be measured; it was a time in which the world almost changed beyond recognition—and I changed into something, someone, I hardly know.

*

For my first day at school, my parents had gotten us up at dawn and piled me and my older sister into our ancient station wagon, Woodie. We drove for a long time, before turning into the entrance to the school. I remember this clearly, even though I was a girl only six and a half at the time. My parents told me later that I'd complained so much about the length of the trip that they very nearly turned around and drove me back home. They wouldn't have, of course; they knew how important the reality school was—not just to us, but to the whole world. Why else would they have put me through all that testing, and cried when I was accepted?

I remember this, too: my complaints vanished the instant we passed through the reality school's continuum-bubble. A great shock wave hit the hood of the car and flashed past the windows in rainbow colors, and suddenly everything around us changed. Everything—including Woodie. Our station wagon was transformed from a sagging road-barge into a shining fuselage, powered by glowing fusion thrusters and floating on a magnetic cushion. I screamed with joy and amazement, deafening my mom and dad. Marie was screaming just as loudly. At the same moment, the school grounds changed from scorched desert grass to a fairyland setting of whipped cream lawns, cotton candy trees, and gingerbread buildings. I hopped up and down with delight.

It was all window-dressing, of course—not just for the kids, but for the parents, who were preparing to leave their children with a school that few of them could really hope to understand. The parents believed in the school's mission, or they wouldn't have been there; but it probably helped to have the special effects to ease the transition. The effects had little to do with the real function of the school, of course, but it would take us a while to understand that.

Daddy drove up to the parking area, where a centaur with an armband directed him to a space that looked as if it had been saved just for us. We all piled out, Daddy warning me not to touch the fusion thrusters, whose glow was slowly fading to chrome silver. We had a good laugh, walking around our gleaming spaceship-car. Then a team of whinnying ponies drew up, pulling a cart for my bags. We loaded the cart and headed into the administration building.

*

I have no memory of registration, but I vividly recall the reality-view posters that glowed in the walls, and the clots of strange kids gathered around gawking at them. The posters looked like moving holograms, and at first I thought they were just pictures made by artists. It turned out they were actual images of reality-threads that shapers, as graduates of the school were called, had encountered and safely sealed off from our timeline. Marie and I gaped at a world where everyone lived in clouds, where the whole world seemed to be clouds, and nothing looked quite solid, including the people. Wow, I said, feeling the kind of thrill that I got from my favorite stories.

Then we turned to an image filled with stalactites and stalagmites that flickered and slowly changed color as if under a black light. That one stumped us, until an older boy stepped up and explained that it was microscopic metal crystals: a world where everything was solid-state, and all life took the form of electrons and photons. Phew, I thought. Why bother?

The boy, though, seemed to actually like the idea, the way I'd liked the clouds. He grinned, and told me his name was Ashok. And I began to wonder if kids like him were about to become my friends.

*

It was only a little later, at the dorm, that Mom and Dad and Marie had to say good-bye to me. I flashed from giddy pleasure to tears, and starting bawling, "I don't want to stay! I don't want to! I want to go home!"

Alexandra, we've been planning this a long time, my dad started to say, all rationally. Only he couldn't get it out; he started crying, too, and