Dangerous Worlds: The Short Fiction of Brian Herbert

By Brian Herbert

The fantastic collection of bestselling author Brian Herbert’s short fiction, a volume packed with highly imaginative, intriguing stories and ideas. This is the first collection of Brian Herbert’s short fiction, a volume that is packed with highly imaginative, intriguing stories and ideas. In the previously unpublished “Death of the Internet,: Under Burning Skies,” the internet is wiped out—forever!—leaving hundreds of millions of people unable to function without a technology that they have become addicted to, and totally dependent upon. Another previously unpublished story, "Earth Games" describes an alien world where Earth people are kept prisoner and forced to perform competitions with hotrod automobiles. Those games strongly resemble rush-hour commute experiences in major U.S. cities, where drivers compete for lane space and make rude hand gestures to one another. A slight difference: the cars in this story have machine guns on the fenders, and cannons on the rooftops! Two of the stories in this collection—“Earth Games” and “The Stakeout”—were edited by Brian’s father Frank Herbert, the famed author of DUNE, in the early 1980s, and rewritten by Brian, with those expert comments in mind. A New York Times-bestselling author, Brian has written many works of fiction and non-fiction. Brian is best known as the coauthor of 14 new Dune-series novels, written with Kevin J. Anderson. In his solo books, Brian is known for addressing important social issues, such as the environment, politics, and religion. In his highly original novel OCEAN, the ocean and its sea creatures declare war on human civilization, in retaliation for pollution and other human-caused abuses that are fouling the waters of the planet. In DANGEROUS WORLDS, the characters find themselves in an ocean of deep, deep trouble, and must try to get out of seemingly impossible situations. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781614753841

Brian Herbert

Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert, wrote the definitive biography of his father, Dreamer of Dune, which was a Hugo Award finalist. Brian is president of the company managing the legacy of Frank Herbert and is an executive producer of the motion picture Dune, as well as of the TV series Dune: The Sisterhood. He is the author or coauthor of more than forty-five books, including multiple New York Times bestsellers, has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and is always working on several projects at once. He and his wife, Jan, have traveled to all seven continents, and in 2019, they took a trip to Budapest to observe the filming of Dune.

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Book Description

This is the first collection of Brian Herbert’s short fiction, a volume that is packed with highly imaginative, intriguing stories and ideas. In the previously unpublished Death of the Internet: Under Burning Skies, the internet is wiped out—forever!—leaving hundreds of millions of people unable to function without a technology that they have become addicted to, and totally dependent upon. Another previously unpublished story, Earth Games describes an alien world where Earth people are kept prisoner and forced to perform competitions with hotrod automobiles. Those games strongly resemble rush-hour commute experiences in major US cities, where drivers compete for lane space and make rude hand gestures to one another. A slight difference: the cars in this story have machine guns on the fenders, and cannons on the rooftops!

Two of the stories in this collection—Earth Games and The Stakeout—were edited by Brian’s father, Frank Herbert, the famed author of Dune, in the early 1980s. The stories were then rewritten by Brian, with those expert comments in mind.

A New York Times-bestselling author, Brian has written many works of fiction and non-fiction. He is best known as the coauthor of 14 new Dune-series novels, written with Kevin J. Anderson. In his solo books, Brian is known for addressing important social issues, such as the environment, politics, and religion. In his highly original novel Ocean, the ocean and its sea creatures declare war on human civilization, in retaliation for pollution and other human-caused abuses that are fouling the waters of the planet. In the Timeweb trilogy, he postulates that the entire galaxy is a single ecosystem, and is crumbling in a huge environmental disaster. In The Stolen Gospels series, Brian writes about a group of women who have discovered female-oriented gospels that were stolen centuries ago, and were never included in the Bible—gospels that describe female apostles of Jesus. In The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma, the American continents are a green utopia, but the government is a police state, with severe penalties for infractions—violators are recycled!

In Dangerous Worlds, the characters find themselves in a universe of deep, deep trouble, and must try to get out of seemingly impossible situations. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t!

Brian Herbert

Kobo Edition – 2016

WordFire Press

wordfirepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-61475-384-1

Copyright © 2016 by DreamStar, Inc.

Two Heads and One Fat Pig © 2015 by DreamStar, Inc. previously unpublished.

Earth Games © 2015 by DreamStar, Inc. previously unpublished.

The Stakeout © 2015 by DreamStar, Inc. previously unpublished.

"The Egg and the Dragon" © 2005 by DreamStar, Inc., part of a round-robin novel The Omega Egg edited by Mike Resnick, published online by Fictionwise.com 2005.

The Great Steam Time Machine © 2012 by DreamStar, Inc. and Bruce

Taylor, previously published in Resurrection Engines, Scott Harrison, ed.

Death of the Internet: Under Burning Skies © 2015 by DreamStar, Inc.

and Bruce Taylor, previously unpublished.

The Bone Woman © 1994 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards,

previously published in Dark Destiny, Edward E. Kramer, ed.

The Contract © 1995 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards,

previously published in Forbidden Acts, Nancy A. Collins and Edward E. Kramer, eds.

Dropoff © 1995 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards,

previously published in Dante’s Disciples, Peter Crowther and Edward E. Kramer, eds.

Blood Month © 1995 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards,

previously published in Dark Destiny: Proprietors of Fate, Edward E. Kramer, ed.

Raiders from the Ghost World © 1996 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards, previously published in Pawn of Chaos, Edward E. Kramer, ed.

The McElvoy File © 2015 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards,

previously unpublished.

Santaphobia © 2015 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards,

previously unpublished.

Caveat Emptor © 2015 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards,

previously unpublished.

The Norre Fen Murders © 2015 by DreamStar, Inc. and the Estate of Marie Landis-Edwards,

previously unpublished.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

This book 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. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by Julie Duong, Duong Cover Designs

Art Director Kevin J. Anderson

Cover artwork images by Dollar Photo Club

Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

www.RuneWright.com

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

Published by

WordFire Press, an imprint of

WordFire, Inc.

PO Box 1840

Monument, CO 80132

Contents

Book Description

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Two Heads and One Fat Pig

Earth Games

The Stakeout

The Egg and the Dragon

The Great Steam Time Machine

Death of the Internet: Under Burning Skies

The Bone Woman

The Contract

Dropoff

Blood Month

Raiders from the Ghost World

The McElvoy File

Santaphobia

Caveat Emptor

The Norre Fen Murders

If You Liked …

About the Author

Other WordFire Press Titles by Brian Herbert

Dedication

For Frank Herbert, Beverly Herbert, and Jan Herbert, who encouraged me to write stories.

Thanks so much for your love, patience, and guidance.

Introduction

When my first novel, Sidney’s Comet, was published in 1983, my mother told me it was unusual for me to be selling novels without first having sold short stories. She was right, as I would confirm later, years after her tragic death in 1984, which I wrote about in Dreamer of Dune. The more I learned about writing, and the more novels I published over the years, I realized how rare my experience was. Now, after having published millions of words in novels and non-fiction books, I am pleased to present my first collection of short stories. (Not included here are a number of Dune-series short stories that I co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson. Readers can find many of those stories at WordFire Press.)

Back in December 1980, I mailed two satirical science fiction short stories to my father for his opinion—Earth Games and The Stakeout. At the time, Frank and Beverly Herbert were living in the Hawaiian Islands, near the town of Hana on the eastern shore of Maui. It was a beautiful area with no high-rise developments, a paradise where ancient Hawaiian kings vacationed long ago.

Earth Games described an alien world where Earth people were kept prisoner and forced to perform competitions with hotrod automobiles. Those games strongly resembled rush-hour commute experiences in major US cities, where drivers competed for lane space and made rude hand gestures to one another. A slight difference: the cars in my story had machine guns on the fenders, and cannons on the rooftops!

Early in 1981, Dad mailed the stories back to me, with his notations, and this brief letter:

Dear Brian –

You have some problems with point of view (POV) and detailing a story. We’ll discuss when we see you in the spring. Keep on writing. Your technique shows improvement.

Love–

Dad

By the summer of 1981, I had completed a second draft of Earth Games, and had also done a major rewrite of my first science fiction novel, Sidney’s Comet. I mailed both of them to my new literary agent, Clyde Taylor at Curtis Brown in New York City. A short time later Clyde had good news for me about Sidney’s Comet—Berkley Books wanted to publish it in paperback, and it came out in 1983, in time for my mother to see it and read the terrific review it received from Publishers Weekly. (This was actually my third published book, following two earlier humor collections that I sold directly to Price/Stern/Sloan in Los Angeles: Classic Comebacks and Incredible Insurance Claims).

Heeding Frank Herbert’s expert advice, I further revised my short story Earth Games, though it was not published or even submitted for publication. Instead, a portion of it became a scene in my second science fiction novel, The Garbage Chronicles, which Berkley Books published in 1985. There are a number of differences between this short story and the dramatic scene in the novel. For one, the character Enrique in the short story became the heroic Tom Javik in the novel. I hope my readers find the two versions interesting, for their similarities and differences.

Based on Dad’s comments, I also rewrote The Stakeout. He did not like my original ending for the story, and put a large bracket around the last four paragraphs of the first draft, with this note in the margin: Bad ending—Rewrite. I rewrote the story, adding two plot surprises—one in the middle of the story, and another near the end.

I wrote The Egg and the Dragon in 2005 as part of a round-robin novel that included contributions from several authors under the title The Omega Egg, edited by Mike Resnick.

I am also including my first story that was ever committed to paper, when I was seven years old, and living in a little beach shack north of Tacoma, Washington. My mother liked the story so much when I told it to her that she typed it up, and put my name at the bottom, along with the date. I called it Two Heads and One Fat Pig (1955). It’s probably a typical tale told by an imaginative seven-year-old, but I thought it should be included in this collection of my short stories. It is the only one that remains from my childhood.

Two stories in this collection are collaborations with the noted fantasy author Bruce Taylor, who is widely known as Mr. Magic Realism. One, The Great Steam Time Machine, is a steampunk story about an incredible time machine that is operated by steam power. It was included in the anthology Resurrection Engines, edited by Scott Harrison. The other collaboration with Bruce, Death of the Internet: Under Burning Skies has never been published before, and shows the folly of hundreds of millions of people losing their humanity to the technology of the internet and smart phones. It reveals how utterly helpless they would be if the internet crashed forever. Yes, forever.

This new collection also includes eight short stories that I wrote with my late cousin, Marie Landis. (She and I also published two horror novels—Memorymakers and Blood on the Sun). Four of these new stories are published here for the first time—The McElvoy File, Santaphobia, Caveat Emptor, and The Norre Fen Murders. The other five, The Bone Woman, The Contract, Dropoff, Blood Month, and Raiders from the Ghost World, were included in anthologies published by White Wolf Publishing or Avon Books.

Raiders from the Ghost World was included in the anthology Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion, a collection of stories based upon Michael Moorcock’s writings. Raiders revisits a favorite theme of mine—the way people in Western nations consume too much, far more than they really need. In this story, the citizens of the Kingdom of Greehyll are like that, but are forced to live without their material goods, because creatures from the Ghost World are slipping into their dimension and stealing everything, leaving homes and castles barren. This theme is also touched upon in Death of the Internet, and is a major aspect of my novel Sidney’s Comet. In that novel, consumer goods are cluttering Earth so much that there is no place for garbage, or even for the burial of bodies. As a consequence, governments catapult all trash and bodies into outer space. Unfortunately, there are life forms out there who take offense at this littering, and send it all hurtling back in a huge garbage comet that threatens to wipe out the planet.

I hope you enjoy this new collection of short stories. In a number of them, as I often to do in my novels, I use humor to highlight important social issues.

Brian Herbert

Seattle, Washington

May 16, 2015

Two Heads and One Fat Pig

Once upon a time when children believed in talking pigs there was a fat pig that had two heads, and this pig talked too much. And one day a man came walking down the road and on his shoulder was an axe gleaming silver. And why don’t you try to guess what he was looking for? If you want to know what he was looking for, I’ll tell you. He was looking for a fat pig just like Two Heads.

And when he saw Two Heads and how fat he was he started to open the pig pen, to get him. But when he got the pen opened Two Heads ran out of his pen and the man ran after him.

Pretty soon Two Heads came to a forest. So he looked for a place to hide and to sleep. Pretty soon he found a secret cave. He went in and found a place that the man would not find him.

2 o’clock in the afternoon the man came by, but he did not see the cave so he went on. Pretty soon the man met a lady. He asked the lady if she had seen a fat pig.

The lady said, No, I have not seen a fat pig.

So the man walked on.

Only back where Two Heads was, when he saw that the man was gone, he slipped out of the cave and took a shortcut and got to Pigsville before the man did and ordered some pigs to fix a grand dinner for the man so he would not eat Two Heads. So when the man got to Pigsville, two pigs were on guard.

And so they took the man to the table and told him all about the feast. And so they all sat down at the table and ate.

Brian Herbert

February 1, 1955

Earth Games

Many millions of light years from Earth, the planet Cork was the principal world in a dying solar system. Once known for its ideal wine-growing valleys, Cork’s climate became too hot for the survival of the best grapes. As its three suns brightened in a relatively short period of time, the grape production fell off severely.

Corker warships searched the galaxy for planets best suited to raising the Grenache wine grapes all Corkers required as daily sustenance. Earth became one of the conquered worlds that was suitable for this purpose. Within a decade, the Corkers had established a regular travel route between their doomed planet and Earth, bringing back that distant world’s grapes and slaves to work in the remaining Corker vineyards.

Millions of Corkers left during this period of upheaval, emigrating to the newly-conquered worlds. But others remained on Cork … some out of fondness for memories and traditions … others out of stubbornness. A few even harbored faint hopes that conditions might improve, that the suns might begin to cool. The entire Corker royal family remained as well, rather like a captain refusing to desert his sinking vessel.

To keep the minds of the remaining Corkers off the serious problems of the day, elaborate entertainment spectacles were staged, in which the slaves were forced to participate. One favorite game, Road Rage, was based on an ancient Earth highway ritual, and the Corker promoters even brought in old Earth equipment for authenticity.…

O O O

It was a scorching afternoon, with three white-hot Corker suns overhead. Sitting in a Manno fighter car, the Earth slave Enrique Pierce dripped perspiration as he listened to the old slave in his pit crew. Dressed in the blue shorts, tee-shirt and cap of the Manno Squadron, the old man leaned against the car door, speaking through the open window.

Do you see that name on the side of your fighter car by the engine portholes? he said, in his gravelly voice. Buick? The Buicks were a ruling family on Earth, you know. The old slave rubbed a corner of one eye. That was many years ago, of course.

I know, Enrique said, impatiently. He looked away, anxious for his turn to fight, and only heard some of the old slave’s ensuing words.

As Enrique watched across his metallic blue hood, other supercharged Buicks and Pontiacs on the giant auto carrier roared down ramps onto the freeway. Enrique’s car was on the top level, a random placement having nothing to do with his stature as the Manno ace. In a few minutes he would start the engine.

They used to race and fight on the highways of old Earth, the old slave said, but they only used pistols against each other in those days, or rifles … nothing like the firepower you have. And sometimes they just flipped each other off.

Enrique tuned out and watched the enemy Wommo auto carrier position itself across the simmering strip of concrete battlefield. Wonder if Marta’s on that one, he thought. God, I hope not.

He visualized the pretty, green-eyed blonde, and remembered what she’d said to him once, that she liked his tallness, and thought he was handsome with his olive skin and straight black hair. She’d even laughed and said that his only physical flaw was a nose that was a bit too long and arched at the bridge.

A Corker overseer near the ramp control panel yelled, Cut the chatter! Pay attention to your duties! Short and round with a backpack of grain alcohol strapped to his back, the Grenache-purple Corker stood on six stubby legs. His peculiar, scaly skin had bumps that looked like flattened grapes, and even from a distance of ten meters, Enrique could hear the sucking sounds the creature made while working tubes that led from his grain alcohol pack to his mouth.

The old slave resumed talking. The Corker glared again, then spit purple phlegm and looked away. Enrique heard parts of sentences describing hundreds of years ago, when the powerful Corker fleet defeated Earth and its allied planets in huge space battles.

It’s Manno against Wommo! a Corker loudspeaker announced. Enrique heard the sucking sound over the loudspeaker. The crowd of drunken Corker spectators roared with approval.

Cork’s suns could explode at any moment, you know, the old slave said. And these competitions are supposed to keep people from thinking about that.

Enrique touched the starter button early to avoid having to hear more. The supercharged 1956 Buick roared to life like an angry, rudely awakened beast. It rumbled roughly and