Celestial Debris

By Lawrence Watt-Evans

Twenty stories by Hugo-winning author Lawrence Watt-Evans, spanning the cosmos from spaceships to unicorns. Includes the following:

Fragments
How I Maybe Saved the World Last Tuesday Before Breakfast
The Garrison
Pickman's Modem
Teaching Machines
Keep the Faith
One Man's Meat
Hearts and Flowers
Unicornucopia
Visions
One Million Lightbulbs
Larger Than Life
One of the Boys
The Sidekick
The Murderer
Revised Edition
Celestial Debris
Targets
Choice
Tomorrow Never Knows

• Language: English
• Publisher: Misenchanted Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781619910560

Lawrence Watt-Evans

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Lawrence Watt-Evans has been a full-time writer and editor for more than twenty years. The author of more than thirty novels, over one hundred short stories, and more than one hundred and fifty published articles, Watt-Evans writes primarily in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comic books. His short fiction has won the Hugo Award as well as twice winning the Asimov's Readers Award. His fiction has been published in England, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Poland, France, Hungary, and Russia He served as president of the Horror Writers Association from 1994 to 1996 and after leaving that office was the recipient of HWA's first service award ever. He is also a member of Novelists Inc., and the Science Fiction Writers of America. Married with two children, he and his wife Julie live in Maryland.

Book preview

Celestial

Debris

Twenty stories of science fiction & fantasy

by

Lawrence Watt-Evans

Misenchanted Press

Bainbridge Island

These stories are works of fiction. None of the characters and events portrayed herein are intended to represent actual person living or dead.

Celestial Debris

Copyright ©1991-1998, 2002 by Lawrence Watt Evans

All rights reserved

Fragments first appeared in the July 1992 issue of Interzone.

How I Maybe Saved the World Last Tuesday Before Breakfast first appeared in Bruce Coville’s Book of Aliens, edited by Bruce Coville, published by Scholastic Books, February 1994.

The Garrison first appeared in Castle Fantastic, edited by John DeChancie & Martin H. Greenberg, published by DAW Books, March 1996.

Pickman’s Modem first appeared in the February 1992 issue of Asimov’s.

Teaching Machines first appeared in the March 1995 issue of Asimov’s.

Keep the Faith first appeared in Isaac’s Universe Vol. 2: Phases in Chaos, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, published by Avon Books, July 1991.

One Man’s Meat first appeared in Isaac’s Universe Vol. 3: Unnatural Diplomacy, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, published by Avon Books, July 1992.

Hearts and Flowers first appeared in Full Spectrum 5, edited by Jennifer Hershey, Tom Dupree, and Janna Silverstein, published by Bantam Books, August 1995.

Visions first appeared in Grails: Quests, Visitations, and Other Occurrences, edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, & Edward Kramer, published by Unnameable Press, 1992.

One Million Lightbulbs was written for Coney Island Wonder Stories, but appeared in an earlier edition of this collection first, as the publication of Coney Island Wonder Stories was delayed.

Larger Than Life first appeared in The Ultimate Zombie, edited by Byron Preiss and John Betancourt, published by Dell, October 1993.

One of the Boys first appeared in Superheroes, edited by John Varley and Ricia Mainhardt, published by Ace Books, January 1995.

The Sidekick first appeared in Between the Darkness and the Fire, edited by Jeffry Dwight, published by Wildside Press, August 1998.

The Murderer first appeared in the April 1993 issue of Asimov’s.

Revised Edition first appeared in Amazing Stories: The Anthology, edited by Kim Mohan, published by Tor Books, May 1995.

Celestial Debris first appeared in Starfarer’s Dozen, edited by Michael Stearns, published by Jane Yolen Books, 1995.

Targets appeared simultaneously in the May 1991 issues of Interzone and Aboriginal SF.

Choice first appeared in How to Save the World, edited by Charles Sheffield, published by Tor Books, September 1995.

Tomorrow Never Knows first appeared in Bone Saw #1, published by Tundra Publications, March 1992.

Unicornucopia first appeared in Unicorns II, edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois, published by Ace Books, November 1992.

Cover art by Luca Oleastri – www.rotwangstudio.com

Cover design by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Published by Misenchanted Press

www.misenchantedpress.com

Dedicated to Gardner Dozois,

who I really should have mentioned

in my Hugo acceptance speech.

Contents

Introduction

Fragments

How I Maybe Saved the World Last Tuesday Before Breakfast

The Garrison

Pickman’s Modem

Teaching Machines

Keep the Faith

One Man’s Meat

Hearts and Flowers

Visions

One Million Lightbulbs

Larger Than Life

One of the Boys

The Sidekick

The Murderer

Revised Edition

Celestial Debris

Targets

Choice

Tomorrow Never Knows

Unicornucopia

About the Author

Other Books by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Introduction

Back in 1992, Del Rey published a collection of my short fiction entitled Crosstime Traffic (now available again, this time from Misenchanted Press). That volume gathered together pretty much all the worthwhile stories I’d written at the time I began assembling it—but I’d begun assembling it in 1990 or so, and I only really got the hang of writing short stories around 1986. Those nineteen stories were the vast majority of my published less-than-novel-length fiction at the time.

Since then, I’ve accumulated a much larger body of work—at least eighty more of my short stories and novelets had been published when I first decided it was time for another collection.

Obviously, there aren’t eighty stories in this volume; they wouldn’t fit, and frankly, some don’t deserve to be reprinted. Instead I’ve chosen twenty of my favorites, emphasizing science fiction—where I think I do my best short work—over fantasy, and deliberately excluding several categories.

You won’t find any really gruesome horror here. I write it, all right, and I’m very proud of some of it, but I don’t want to drive away readers who might otherwise enjoy this book by including stories likeDead Babies orStab. Vampires have been arbitrarily banished as well, and most of the stories that I think might induce nightmares or queasy stomachs will have to wait for another volume. I did retain an occasional zombie or Lovecraftian beastie, a creepy alien or two, and at least one SF story that’s pretty disturbing, but I’ve kept the outright gore to a minimum.

You won’t find any stories from ongoing series here—no tales of Ethshar nor George Pinkerton adventures. I hope to someday collect those in their own unified collections.

Quite aside from Mr. Pinkerton and the Hegemony of Ethshar, you won’t find much fantasy adventure here, even though that’s my bread and butter at novel length. Oh, there are some unicorns, and the Holy Grail puts in an appearance, but if you’re looking for flashing swords and dragonfire, you’re in the wrong place. I have no solid reason for this particular bias; it just felt right.

So what will you find?

I write short fiction for fun; it doesn’t earn enough money to justify the time spent on it if it isn’t fun. In a way it’s the equivalent of doodles and sketches, where novels are finished paintings. Short fiction is where I try out ideas and techniques I may never use again. For me, as often as not short stories just sort of happen, and are then tossed out to the market. They’re part of the debris that accumulated in twenty years of writing for a living.

So I’ve picked through that debris to find the choicest bits of this and pieces of that. I’ve gathered traditional science fiction, the odd fantasy or two, and some stories I can’t classify. I’m including stories published in major markets, and stories published in obscure magazines or long-out-of-print anthologies, as well as one story never before published anywhere and another only previously published in Britain. I think they’re some of my best work, gathered here for your entertainment. They don’t really have much in common beyond the fact that I wrote them, and I like them.

I hope you’ll like them, too.

Fragments

Sometimes stories just happen. This one did. The first fragment just appeared in my head, without any planning on my part at all. I sat down and wrote it, just as it is here. Then I put it aside for awhile.

I came across it again months later, and immediately wrote the rest of the story. I suppose my subconscious had been working on it without telling me.

I’d been thinking about then that it would be nice to have a story in Interzone, the British SF magazine, so I sentFragments to them and they bought it. This was its first American publication.

Once upon a time, my mother told me, back in the Dead And Gone, there was a land called California where the sun always shone, and it was always warm, and it never rained; where the people were beautiful, and everyone had a great big car that could drive as fast as the wind, and there were good roads everywhere to drive them on. And in California was a place called Hollywood, or maybe Holywood, and that was where all the dreams came from.

And people didn’t dream their dreams alone in bed, inside their heads, the way we do now; they watched them unfold as colored pictures, larger than life, brighter than life, on great silver screens that hung in theaters, above the stage, or in magic boxes calledvideos that they kept in their houses. And the dreams always had happy endings, and they always made sense—virtue triumphed, and evil was punished, and true love won out in the end.

I’ve never been sure how to take my mother’s stories—I mean, it all just sounds like a fairy tale, or an allegory of some kind, but she didn’t seem to mean it that way. Even when I asked her straight out, she insisted that California was real, in the Dead And Gone, and Hollywood was real—but she changed the story, said that they didn’t really make dreams there, they made films, or movies, or videotapes, or television, and when I asked her what all those things meant she couldn’t explain.

They were all just other names for dreams, she said.

And maybe Hollywood wasn’t exactly real real, she would say, it was all sort of fake, but it wasn’t made up, and then she would get confused, or I would.

So maybe dreams used to be different, I don’t know.

R

Iasked my mother once what had happened to California, and she said she didn’t know. I asked if it was still there, just all ruined, and she said she didn’t know. It might have fallen into the sea, she said.

She didn’t know.

I was reading a book we found—it still had the back cover and almost all the pages. I don’t read very well, because I’ve never had time to work at it, and there isn’t all that much to read anyway, but I read this book. It talked about a place called Atlantis that sank into the sea.

I asked my mother if Atlantis was another name for California.

She burst out crying, and wouldn’t talk to me for hours.

When she would talk to me again, she told me that California was real, and Atlantis wasn’t; that California was still there fifty years ago, and Atlantis had been gone for at least two thousand; that there are lots of made-up places that sank, like Lemuria and Mu and Numenor, and Atlantis is just one of them.

I don’t understand any of it. Why would people make up places like that? Why are there so many? If Atlantis wasn’t real, how could it have sunk two thousand years ago?

I asked my mother if she was ever in California before it sank, and she got angry again.

It didn’t sink, she said.Or maybe it did.

She wouldn’t say if she’d ever been there.

R

We found videotapes one day. Videotapes are brittle black box shapes.

I thought videotapes were a kind of dream, but my mother said these black things are videotapes.

They aren’t dreams; they’re just black plastic. They don’t seem to be much use; they aren’t strong enough to build anything. They’re shiny, though.

R

We were taking apart a car, and my mother yelled at us.

Not that one! she said.That’s a fifty-six shevvie, it might be the last one in the world!

I told her we needed hoses and pipes, and steel springs for weapons, and wheels, and that we wanted the oil to burn for heat, and she said,"Yes, that’s fine, but not that one! Can’t you find any others?"

Lindsey and I didn’t see what difference it made, but we decided we could let my mother have one car for herself. There are plenty of cars, though most of them have a lot more pieces missing.

When we left her there she was sitting inside it, holding the wheel thing and talking to herself.

R

When Lindsey first found Stuart he tried to rape her, but we didn’t mind, really. Anybody would have, in that situation. She ran away from him, and we went back together and talked to him. We figured we could probably trade with him—just about any time we find someone new there are things we have that they want, and things they have that we want.

All Stuart said he wanted was sex with Lindsey.

We thought it over, but Lindsey didn’t like him very much, so we said we didn’t think so.

But I could see he had a lot of good things—he had aluminum pans, and lights that were much brighter than ours. So I asked if he would like to meet my mother—with us as chaperones, on neutral ground, of course, in case she didn’t like him, either.

But she did like him. She sent us both away almost at once, and we walked off, leaving the two of them sitting on a block of concrete, talking about computers. Old people all seem to know about computers, but none of them can explain very well what they were for, and I’ve never figured it out. There are a lot of things from the Dead And Gone that are like that; it makes it very hard to understand the old people, sometimes.

We had a computer once, but the battery died when I was a baby.

R

My mother lived at Stuart’s place for months. She liked it there, with the aluminum pans to cook in and the lights that were bright enough to read by.

He’s got a generator, she told us. I don’t know if it was true. I never saw it.

Lindsey and I didn’t move in there with them; we liked having our own private place, and Stuart and my mother liked having their own private place. We didn’t have bright lights run by a generator, we just had old car batteries that kept our old lights glowing, but that was enough. And I cooked in the same pots I always had.

R

We didn’t see Stuart that often, so it took some time before we realized how irritated he was getting.

When I saw his hand was bloody, I asked how it happened.

I hit a wall, he said.

I looked at his hand.

I’d seen people hit walls before; when we were with the Chicago tribe there was a man who hit walls when things went wrong. I looked at Stuart’s hand, and I knew he hadn’t hit anything just once.

Are you and Mom getting along okay? I asked.

He looked at me sideways, like I’d just shown I was smarter than he’d thought.

No, he said. I nodded.

I thought you two would have fun together, talking about the Dead And Gone. And the other thing, of course.

We did, Stuart said."Really, we did. But she won’t talk about anything else."

I blinked, and thought about that.

What else is there? I asked.

My mother came to find us. She was crying. Stuart was packing to go; he said she could have the old place, he’d find a new one. She wasn’t invited to come with him. He would leave the aluminum pans, too.

I went to talk to him—man to man, my mother called it.

Georgie, he said when he saw me.I thought she might send you.

I nodded.

Well, it won’t do any good, but I don’t mind talking to you, he said, as he heaved bundles onto his cart.

Then why are you going? I asked.

Because I can’t stand listening to her any more, he told me.Because all she talks about is the Dead And Gone.

Well, what else should she talk about? I asked, puzzled.

Well, how about what’s yet to come? he asked, pushing the bundles neatly into place.

What do you mean? Nothing’s left to come.

What about tomorrow? he asked.

What about it? It’ll be just like today.

Will it? Why?

Because...

I didn’t have an answer. It just always had been. Ever since I was born, everything had been the same. Oh, the weather changed, it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, sunny some days and rainy on others; I grew up; some days hunting was good, some days it was poor; but nothing really changed.

Georgie, Stuart said,your mother saw a lot of movies as a kid, and I think she remembers every single one of them, but she never got the point.

What point?

The people in the movies never did what your mother does, he said."They never sat around waiting for life to happen to them. They went out and made things happen."

But that was in the Dead And Gone, I said.Dreams were different then.

He looked at me, and it was a funny look, as if he thought I’d been hurt or something.

No, he said.The world was different then, all right—but people were the same, and dreams were the same. Those are two things that really don’t change. He pulled some straps tight across his cart.People change the world with their dreams, but people don’t change, and dreams don’t change.

No, my mother told me, I said.People watched dreams together, she said.

He made a face.

That’s what she does now, he said.She sits there, watching the old dreams in her head and telling me all about them. He sighed.

Georgie, he said,"I want my own dreams, new dreams." He picked up the pulling bar.

I guess it’s because you’re from before, I said.

He left.

R

Ididn’t tell my mother what Stuart had said; I just told her he was gone. She cried for awhile.

Dreams don’t change the world. My mother has plenty of dreams. I don’t, but she does.

Sometimes she sits in her car, talking to people who aren’t there, pretending it’s going down the road as fast as the wind.

Cars don’t run any more. My mother says it’s because there isn’t any gasoline, but I don’t think that’s why. I think it’s because the Dead And Gone is dead and gone. All the old dreams and the old magic are dead, and we need to live in the here and now.

My mother tries to live in the Dead And Gone, but she can’t. She wants to live in California, I think. Stuart tried to live somewhere else, too, I guess—someplace that’s never existed.

Atlantis, maybe.

But most people live here and now. I do. Lindsey does. Our baby does—we named her Shevvie, to please my mother.

Really, you know, it’s a good world, a young world.

Why would we want to change it?

How I Maybe Saved the World Last Tuesday Before Breakfast

When I heard that Bruce Coville was looking for stories for Bruce Coville’s Book of Aliens, I sat down and thought about what really ought to go into a kids’ story about aliens. The aliens shouldn’t be humanoid, I thought—that’s been done much too often. They shouldn’t speak English—that’s too easy. They should be alien. I didn’t want little green men.

But they didn’t need to be scary. They could be cute...

And from that, I had the story.

When I woke up last Tuesday morning and found out that it was only 6:15 and my kid sister Karen was tugging at my sleeve, I was really mad. She wasn’t supposed to be in my room ever, and especially not when I was trying to sleep.

"What do you want?" I growled.

"Craig, you gotta come downstairs right now," she said, not loud, but talking right into my ear.

No, I don’t, I told her, and I pulled the blankets up over my head.

"Yes, you do, she said. You’ve gotta come and see what I found. You’ve gotta help me talk Mom and Dad into letting me keep it."

I blinked under the covers.

Keep it? Keep what?

I decided that maybe I’d better get up after all.

Go away and let me get dressed, I said.

When I heard the door close, I got out of bed and dressed as fast as I could. Then I went downstairs, and there was Karen, waiting in the front hall.

Come on, she said, opening the front door.

"Karen, I said, we aren’t supposed to go out before Mom and Dad get up!"

Just to the porch!

Well, that was probably okay, and anyway, she was outside before I could argue any more, so I followed her.

Karen, what is this all... I started to say. Then I stopped and stared.

She had it under the old laundry basket Mom gave her to keep toys in, and I couldn’t see it very well, but I could see that it was moving, and that it was purple. Not a dull purple like maybe a lizard would be, but a really bright purple. I knelt on the porch and took a look through the plastic mesh.

It was furry and purple all over. It had six legs, and big yellowy-green eyes, and some wiggly things that weren’t exactly tentacles but that was the closest thing I could think of. It was looking back at me.

It sounds scary, but it wasn’t. It was really cute.

I wasn’t really all the way awake yet, so I wasn’t thinking very clearly, but I still knew there just isn’t anything with six legs and purple fur, either cute or scary. My eyes got big and I stared at it, trying to figure it out, and it stared back.

I’m gonna keep it, Karen said. I’m gonna name it Roger.

"Karen, you can’t keep it, I said. We don’t know what it is."

"It’s mine," Karen said.

Where’d you find it?

Here on the porch, she said, but she said it with the you better believe this tone that means she’s telling a whopper. I decided not to argue about that.

Well, you can’t keep it. We don’t know what it is, or where it came from, or anything. Maybe somebody’s looking for it.

She got a stubborn look on her face. Nobody’s looking for it, she said. If anyone around here had a pet like that we’d have heard about it. Remember when Mr. Bester had that snake, and the Homeowners’ Association tried to make him get rid of it?

It’s not the same thing, I said, but she was sort of right. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have had a thing like that without everyone in the neighborhood knowing about it.

In fact, I didn’t think anyone could have a thing like that without everyone in the world knowing about it. Purple fur? Six legs?

I looked at the thing again, and it made a squeaky little noise.

I knew we couldn’t keep it, whatever it was—Mom wouldn’t even let us keep a cat. I wasn’t sure what to do about it, though. If we just turned it loose it might get hurt. We didn’t know where it came from, or anything.

But then I got thinking about where it could have come from, and I could feel my eyes get even bigger, and even though it was the middle of July and the day was already sunny and warm I suddenly felt kind of cold.

Karen, I said, "where’d you really find it?"

She just looked stubborn.

C’mon, you’ve gotta tell me!

Why? she demanded, sticking out her chin.

Because I think it must have come from outer space, I explained.

Then her eyes got big.

Maybe they’re going to invade us! I said.

What’s ’invade’?

Try to take over, and make everybody be slaves. Like a war, kind of, only worse.

She looked at me like I’d just said something really stupid. "Roger wouldn’t hurt anybody," she said, pointing at the laundry basket.

I looked at Roger, and it blinked at me and made a sort of eep! noise. I had to admit it wasn’t exactly a scary monster from outer space; it wasn’t any bigger than Ms. Watson’s cat Sugarplum, and I didn’t see any fangs or claws or anything. And those tentacle things didn’t look dangerous.

But if it wasn’t a monster from outer space, what the heck was it?

Well, maybe Roger’s one of their slaves that got away, I said. Maybe he’s trying to warn us.

He doesn’t talk.

"He doesn’t talk English, I corrected her. Come on, we’ve gotta let him out of there."

No! she said. If you let him out, Craig, I’ll never speak to you again, and I’ll sneak into your room and wreck all your stuff!

But, Karen, I said, he’s a monster from outer space!

"He is not!"

You don’t know what he is!

Neither do you!

Well, that was true. I couldn’t think of much of anything it could be except a monster from outer space, but maybe it was some kind of mutant or something, instead.

"C’mon, Karen, where’d you really find him? If you don’t tell me I will let him go." I grabbed the laundry basket as if I was going to lift it and let Roger out.

Don’t you dare! she said, and she fell forward on top of the basket, holding it down. I was afraid for a second she was going to squash it, and Roger with it, but she doesn’t weigh much, and the basket held up.

Then you tell me where you found him! I said. If I had to, I could pick up her and the basket, and she knew it.

She got a funny look on her face, then said, Promise you won’t tell?

I hate making promises like that, but I said, Okay, I promise.

Down by the lake, she said.

I kind of stared at her for a couple of minutes.

We live out at the edge of town, where the land starts getting hilly and woodsy, and if you go down to the end of the street and cut through Billy Wechsler’s back yard you can get into a state park, and right up to the edge of a big lake – Lake Cohoptick, it’s called. We aren’t allowed there without a grown-up along, ever since a kid