Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (2 page)

Terry Pratchett
unveiled street signs on a new housing estate in Wincanton, Somerset, which by popular local vote had been named for streets in Discworld's Ankh-Morpork. ‘Personally I'd pay good money to live somewhere called Treacle Mine Road.’ (
Metro
)

Scandal Rocks UK SF!
Shocked by our country's present climate of moral squalor,
SFX
magazine warned all its freelances that henceforth everything must be squeaky-clean. No more expense claims for moats, duck islands, 8000 pound TV sets, paid-off mortgages or zombie servants’ quarters ... oops, wrong script. This teacup-scale storm was triggered by a hapless freelance (Saxon Bullock) giving a rave review to a book he'd previously copy-edited. Hence the
SFX
directive to avoid seeming conflicts of interest.

Science Corner.
A CERN physicist explains
Angels & Demons
to the
Daily Mirror
: ‘Would anti-matter really cause an explosive device?
Dr Shears:
“Yes it could in theory. If you made a Tom Hanks and an anti Tom Hanks you would not be able to tell them apart. But if you put them together we would all be annihilated."’ Having to keep one of them in vacuum to avoid the annihilation reaction with air might offer a clue as to which was which.

Rog Peyton
, hero UK sf book dealer—late of Andromeda Book Co and now trading as Replay Books—warns that the End Times are closing in: ‘I'm desperately trying to fully retire at the end of the year (honest!) ... Novacon 39 [November 2009] will be the last convention I sell books at.'

Publicity Savvy.
A 15m museum devoted to Hergé's 80-year-old creation Tintin opened in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, on 2 June. Having spent years alienating Tintin readers by legal threats against fan websites, the franchise owners proceeded to enrage the invited media with an unheralded ban on photography.

Thog's Masterclass.
Unseen but Evocative Aliens Dept.
‘The alien voices were now a continuous scream of fear without perceptible inter-modulation, but rapidly becoming thinner as though the members of that unholy choir were sinking one by one and drowning in their terrible pool of treacle.’ (Colin Kapp,
The Patterns of Chaos
, 1972) *
Dept of When Things Go Runny.
‘Embarrassment is something I can feel in my flesh, like a handful of sun-warmed mud clapped on my head.... The embarrassment had turned runny. It was horrifying my scalp along a spreading frontier.’ (Neal Stephenson,
Anathem
, 2008) *
Gyropygia Dept.
‘The [aircraft] carrier shuddered. Men sagged, spun on their bottoms.’ (Philip Wylie,
The Answer
, 1955)

John Atkins
(1916-2009), UK author of some fantasy and sf including the future-historical
Tomorrow Revealed
(1955), died on 31 March aged 92.

David Eddings
(1931-2009), best-selling author of the Belgariad sequence—beginning with
Pawn of Prophecy
(1982)—and other very popular fantasy series, died on 2 June; he was 77. Most of his 27 novels were written in collaboration with his wife Leigh, who died in 2007.

John Fairfax
(1930-2009), UK poet and editor whose
Frontier of Going
(1969) was an important early anthology of sf poetry, died on 14 January; he was 78.

Abigail Frost
(1951-2009), UK crafts critic responsible for
Interzone
's design and layout from 1983 to 1985, died at the end of April aged 57.

Hans Holzer
(1920-2009), Austrian-born paranormal pundit who studied the ‘Amityville Horror’ case and wrote two novels about it (plus several other supernatural fictions), died on 26 April. He was 89.

James Kirkup
(1918-2008), UK-born writer and poet who was long embarrassed by the notoriety and (successful) blasphemy prosecution of his 1976
Gay News
poem about Christ, died on 10 May; he was 91. Kirkup published two fantasy plays and an eccentric sf satire,
Queens Have Died Young and Fair
(1993).

Kaoru Kurimoto
(Sumiyo Imaoka, 1953-2009), Japanese author of the 126-volume Guin Saga fantasy sequence plus many other novels, died on 26 May aged 56.

Robert Louit
(1944-2009), French sf editor and critic who translated
Crash
and other Ballard novels (plus Graham Greene, Robert Silverberg and others), died on 13 May aged 64. Authors published by his Dimension SF imprint included Philip K. Dick and Christopher Priest.

Larry Maddock
(Jack Jardine, 1931-2009), US author of the 1960s ‘Agent of T.E.R.R.A.’ series beginning with
The Flying Saucer Gambit
(1966), died on 14 April aged 77. He also wrote as Arthur Farmer and, with his wife Julie Ann Jardine, as Howard L. Cory.

Ken Rand
(1946-2009), US author of
Phoenix
(2004), further genre novels and many shorts, died on 21 April; he was 62.

A. Langley Searles
(1920-2009), editor of the respected scholarly fanzine
Fantasy Commentator
(1943-1953; 1978-2004), died on 7 May aged 88.

Copyright © 2009 David Langford

[Back to Table of Contents]

First off we had to get to the church. Emmie-Lou in her O

ld Krishna was walking home from a solid afternoon's work removing acid tares from the downhill greengarden when he saw the drive flare dropping through the clouds. It was reversed, on braking burn. Whoever's hull it was, it was also glowing red hot, canted at an extreme angle for maximum drag, maximum deceleration, minimum time in atmosphere. The pilot had a job to do which he imagined might get him shot at by the planetary inhabitants. As Old Krishna was, as far as he was aware, the only planetary inhabitant, this did not bode well.

Still, he couldn't run. If he ran, he might fall in the high gravity, catch his stick against one of the outcrops of former civilization that filled the hills, break his glasses and have to grind a new pair, even break a leg. And a broken leg, out here, might mean death. He contented himself with hurrying, helping his stroke-damaged left leg along with his good arm and the stick, going on three legs in the evening.

The house had been selected as a good fortifiable location not easily visible from outside the valley. He had surrounded it quite deliberately with yellowgarden shrubs. The native xanthophyll-reliant vegetation was usually harmless to Earth life, but the shrubs he had chosen were avoided by the native fauna. The house was mostly made of hand-cut stone blocks—he'd cheated by using as many stones levered out of various ruins in the hills as possible, but still doubted he could repeat the feat without industrial construction gear. That sort of work was for the young man he had once been.

This planet's ruins came in three flavours. First came serene, ancient fractal-patterned structures that merged into the landscape; second came massive, hastily-erected polyhedra that clashed with it. The latter were trademarks of the later Adhaferan empire, the former a matter for future archaeologists. Krishna had had neither the time nor the stomach to research that matter for himself.

The third type of ruin was ramshackle, overgrown, cheerfully constructed of the cheapest possible materials, and clearly identifiable as human. Each ruin had a tidy, identical grave before its front door, and many such ruins surrounded Old Krishna's house.

There was an ornamental greengarden next to the house, where he'd managed to keep a few terrene flowers alive outside the confines of a glasshouse—edelweiss, crocus, Alaskan lupin, heather, all chosen for the cold and rarefied air. He had kept the heather for the colour, and the bees. At this time of day she might be in the garden stealing bee-honey, pinning up wet clothes, cutting back flowers, or even just sitting reading in the single hammock.

The bushes round the garden disintegrated in a welter of flame. Incinerated pine needles blew in his face like furnace sinter. He smelled cheap, low-tech reaction mass. Petrochemicals! They were still burning hydrocarbons!

The ship was the mass-produced swing-boomerang type he had been dreading, capable of furling itself up into a delta for atmospheric exit, or making itself straight as a die for vertical take-off and landing. It had just vertically landed in his garden. The satellite defence system should, of course, have vaporized the ship before it even entered the atmosphere, but it had been a decade before anyone had happened by to maintain the defences. His masters had not sent so much as a radio message for years. There had probably been a coup in the inworlds.

He could hear their voices now. He couldn't understand them; they were not using translators. A human ear could only hear impossibly complex birdsong, filling the spectrum of sound from the deep sub-basso-profundo of a mating grouse to the falsetto trill of a bat. The creatures were not singing, however, and did not in any way resemble birds. Old Krishna doubted their speech could be understood by the house translators. Certainly, though, they would speak Proprietor. He had to hurry. They would see reason.

He could hear pre-burn sparklers already, touching off fuel leakages to prevent explosion. He wondered if she could have been killed by their landing jets, and felt a small, irrational surge of joy as he heard her voice. They would not understand the voice. It was not talking to them, after all. It was shouting to him.
"KRISHNA—IT'S ALL RIGHT. I AM GOING WITH THESE GENTLEMEN. YOU SHOULD STAY AWAY."

He gripped his fists tight around the stick until the skin squealed. She was trying to warn him off! She was worried
they
would hurt
him
! He heard his own voice shouting “TIIITAAALIII!"

He heard the magnetohydrodynamic whine of an airlock door closing. It was too late. They had done their business, now they were going. He cursed himself for having set up the comms antenna for her. It allowed her to talk to passing trade ships and hear news from other suns, but it also lit up their location like a neon sign to ships whose purpose was not trade at all.

There was still time, even now. There were always courses of action.

The house was relatively undamaged, though draped with burning fragments of garden. Outside the house was a rough stone cube that Old Krishna, after the manner of his beliefs, had determined was his god. He made his obeisance to it as he entered the house, and bowed to it again as he left with a dusty maximum-survivability container, the lock on which he had to break open with a hammer. Having opened the container, he extracted from it a long tubular device terminating in a spike at one end. He thrust the spike into the ground, uncovered the activator and pulled out the pin. Immediately, the heavy capital end of the device flared into life, no doubt powered by some obscene radiation or other. It would probably be best not to remain close to it.

High above him, deep beneath him, a powerful and no doubt carcinogenic radio signal was being broadcast on all bands millions of miles out into space, saying only one thing.
Come and get me.
Old Krishna had hoped he would never have to use it.

Stamping down the small fires all around the house, he settled down on his god with a book to wait. The book was an exciting fiction allegedly written many thousands of years ago, which he had purchased from a trader. The principal characters included the architect of the entire universe and his only begotten son.

He had reached chapter ten of the book, in which a wicked king stole away a poor man's one small ewe-lamb, when the second swing boomerang appeared in the sky. He put down his book, took up the few possessions he imagined he would be allowed, and walked down the hill to meet the ship.