IGMS Issue 17 Read online

  Issue 17 - June 2010

  http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

  Copyright © 2010 Hatrack River Enterprises

  Table of Contents - Issue 17 - June 2010

  * * *

  Ten Winks to Forever

  by Bud Sparhawk

  An Early Ford Mustang

  by Eric James Stone

  Sparrowjunk

  by Margit Elland Schmitt

  Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain

  by Von Carr

  Frankie and Johnny, and Nellie Bly

  by Richard Wolkomir

  Eye For Eye - Part 1

  by Orson Scott Card

  Nice Kitty

  by David Lubar

  InterGalactic Interview With Paul Di Filippo

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  Letter From The Editor

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  Ten Winks to Forever

  by Bud Sparhawk

  Artwork by Nick Greenwood

  * * *

  "Remember me, Wil Tibbits," Eleanor said just before taking that instantaneous wink into a distant future near a star that had no name. "Maybe I'll see you again at the end of time."

  The likelihood of us running into one another again was negligible. There were simply too many stars.

  And too many years.

  Eleanor felt the need to correct me when, during the first day of our training on Mars, I mentioned something about how the Renkinns had made instantaneous travel possible.

  "It isn't instantaneous," she said. "The Renkinn doesn't work that way."

  "Of course it does," I replied. "It took no time between leaving Earth and arriving here."

  That wasn't completely true. The trip from Earth orbit to Purcel station had taken a few hours, and then there was the delay of getting prepared for the wink, and the recovery time afterwards. But the wink itself had taken no apparent time whatsoever.

  "It wasn't instantaneous," she repeated. "We were winking at light speed, and time," she asserted, "has a universal 'speed' of one second per second."

  "Duh," I replied as though I didn't care. I just wanted to get under her so-superior skin.

  "If . . . ," she went on, eager to belabor her trivial point, "if you had sent a message to Mars the instant we winked, that message would arrive on Mars at the same time as we did."

  "Proving we spent no time in transit," I declared.

  "We only apparently moved instantaneously," she shot back. "The rest of the universe is a few minutes older than us now."

  "So what? For all practical purposes it's the same. Wink at Beijing and appear on Mons Olympus -- no time at all. Who cares about a minute or two? We've wasted more time than that talking about this."

  Of the fifty applicants who met the criteria in the year I signed up, only a half dozen, including Eleanor, volunteered to accept the extreme physiological and mechanical modifications needed to interface with the Renkinns. The tiny number of altered recruits was barely enough to keep pace with the number of Renkinns being produced, and far fewer than those needed to support operations throughout the solar system.

  Nearly instantaneous travel meant that interplanetary exploration was burgeoning. By time Eleanor and I entered the program, Renkinns were winking between every planet and dozens of moons. Only those hard-core pilots shuttling between solar system-wide locations suffered much loss of time, and few cared about the missing days or weeks. It didn't matter when most of the planets were never more than a day's wink apart.

  It all seemed so simple then. Now I wonder if the price I've paid was worth seeing everyone I knew and loved disappear like chaff before the wind.

  My first winks were pretty straightforward, carrying businessmen, engineers, andcolonists around the planets. They'd sit in shuttles that were lodged in clusters around the Renkinn like grapes on a vine, using those shuttles to reach their final destinations once we arrived planet-side.

  The toll the Renkinn interface took on my body and the weeks it took to recover from each trip seemed like a small price to pay. I found a lot of interesting uses for the money and women who attached themselves to me, some of whom didn't even mind the modifications I had had.

  Janet was one of them.

  We met during one of my sailing trips down in the islands. She was nineteen and served as the cook on our boat. I was the captain, or at least that's how I fancied myself as I let others handle the sails and attend to the steering. Janet didn't seem to mind my augmentations and, after she discovered my love of fajitas, figured out how to prepare them seven different ways, flirting with me all the while.

  We had a quickie wedding in Vegas.

  I would have stopped winking when Janet got pregnant the first time, except she convinced me that we needed the money if we were going to raise our family properly.

  "Let's do it just enough," she said, "until we can afford a house, maybe a nice car, and a few family vacations."

  Wasn't that worth giving up a few weeks and months?

  Except we could never seem to get ahead. The house required a lot of money to run, what with the cost of raising two girls who seemed to outgrow their clothing every other month, and the expensive parties Janet threw. Somehow the money seemed to dribble away.

  Two years went by for me, more for Janet, who was now closer to my age than when we were cruising in the Caribbean. Our age difference become more of an issue when I had to do some cascade winks -- hopping from one location to another in a chain of winks that cost me several months of real time and weeks in the hospital afterwards.

  I wanted to give up the winks, but Janet said we didn't have enough money yet. I thought the problem was solved when, a few months later, they increased my pay and included a double bonus for longer winks. I figured that in another subjective year I'd have enough to retire. I liked the idea of giving up winking and settling down with Janet and the two daughters that I'd hardly had time to know.

  Janet figured otherwise. She said we needed more money, which led to a huge row that led to me living in a motel for a few days. Even after that, the argument simmered between us, neither of us willing to bend.

  A few months later the corporation offered me an opportunity to take the newest long-range Renkinn to the Oort Cloud, just over a light-year from the Sun.

  I worried about missing more of the girls' early years, but Janet was very convincing.

  "Don't worry darling," she reassured me. "You'll still be young enough to enjoy the girls when you return."

  The return trip was just as debilitating as the trip out. The only advantage was that, thanks to improved medical care, my recovery didn't take half as long.

  After they released me from the hospital in Heinlein City, I discovered that not only was I several more years out of touch, but my not-so-blushing bride was pregnant with another man's baby. Our divorce was quick and mutual.

  The settlement gave Janet the house and custody of our now pre-pubescent girls, who barely knew who I was. Most of my bonus was used to set up a trust fund that would support the two of them for the rest of their lives. After I paid the lawyer, I invested half of what was left, and spent the rest on whatever helped me forget what a fool I'd been.

  When I sobered up, I signed up for any wink that I could survive.

  Six months after my divorce was final, the first Centauri Renkinn successfully winked home after a nine year round trip. Four of them had been launched at six-month intervals -- the first with the construction crew and their supplies, while the next two carried supplies and equipment. The last carried the scientists and engineers who'd volunteered to be the permanent crew.

  Unlike my own trip outside the solar system, everything had gone exactly as planned. The first pilot to return reported from his hospital bed that construction of
a permanent station was underway when he'd left, four-and-a fraction real years ago for us, about a day for him.

  Eleanor was the other returning pilot. It was a surprise when I visited her. Discounting the issues that wink syndrome brought on, she still looked almost the same age as when we started -- maybe a year or two older -- even though it had been over a decade since we first signed up.

  Somehow I'd never thought much about how Renkinn drivers would age differentially. It stood to reason that those who made the longer winks would age even slower than those who did not. Still, it was disconcerting to face that fact when someone you knew was suddenly seven years younger than you.

  With Centauri station as a modest step to the stars, other longer and more ambitious winks were planned. If humanity had successfully conquered the solar system, why not the universe?

  Because I was a senior driver and had already survived a long wink, they offered me the opportunity to be modified again so that I could take a group of scientists and engineers out to Pavonis. Apparently what had happened to Eleanor and the other Centauri pilots made them rethink a few things about the longer winks.

  Those "few things" meant that I had to have more surgical modifications and endure a few more physiological tweaks and changes -- nothing that would bother my sex life, they kidded, as if the augmentations alone wouldn't send most nubile young ladies screaming into the night.

  I doubt that even that avaricious bitch Janet could have pretended she didn't mind them.

  By the time I returned from Eridani, I was a much modified twenty-eight-year-old whose once-young wife was ashes in the wind, and whose daughters were senior citizens in a nursing home outside of old New Phoenix.

  The "girls" introduced me to their friends at the home in a vague way, as if they couldn't get their minds around exactly who I was. Some of the other residents thought I was a great-grandchild come to visit or maybe that nice staff attendant who brought the good medicines. My augmentations didn't seem to bother the senior citizens, many of whom were half machine themselves.

  Despite that, I didn't visit often. Everything had changed so much that I always seemed to be asking the point of a joke or for an explanation of something that happened. At every turn I was reminded of how much change could take place in eight short decades. In social situations I was completely at sea; everyday cultural references that seemed obvious to everyone else were unfathomable to me.

  I was thirty-one when my last surviving daughter, by then an incredibly ancient woman, died. I immediately volunteered to take three thousand colonists to an as-yet-unnamed planet orbiting Beta Hydrae, 128 light years away. From Hydrae I winked to Tanae, another hundred light years further out.

  I didn't like the four patronizing aultrachvolk, who declared in broken English that they were responsible for assimilating the original Renkinns back into society, but after one look at their shuttle, I felt like an aborigine come ashore on a wooden raft and knew it was necessary.

  The solicitous quartet escorted me down to a gleaming city floating in the middle of the Pacific and set me up in an "authentic" twenty-second century apartment where a black rotary dial telephone sat beside a hideous Victorian couch, over which hung an old-fashioned plasma television screen. The "authentic" toilet facilities are best not described.

  None of my investments, or even the institutions that held them, had survived my extended absence. I was, for all intents and purposes, a ward of the Collective until I mastered some basic social skills and could again take my place in the world.

  It took me very little time to resent my orientation specialist, a so-called expert in antique languages. His lisping attempts to speak the "Englishii" of my time grated on my nerves as much as his misperceptions of my "amusingly fractured subculture," and he seemed completely disinterested when I corrected him on some important points about how things really worked "back in the day."

  The ImPimp, as I thought of it, gave me access to what I later discovered was a children's version of history. A portion of the text concerned scientific advances, describing some significant events whose bases and outcomes were even less understandable than the science behind them. I couldn't grasp the economics of how the Renkinns were used to establish star-spanning economies, and I wondered why anyone would undertake trade whose results would take decades or even centuries to be realized.

  Eventually the committee must have decided that I was incapable of integrating properly into their society, so they offered me a chance to wink some supplies for a group of explorers who had departed a century earlier. I wondered about the depth of their compassion -- for me or the settlers -- when I found out that the destination was nine hundred light years away.

  Without delay they refitted my Renkinn, which was still in prime condition -- except for the antique hull, obsolete navigational gear, and woefully inadequate power supply, all of which they assured me, could be easily upgraded.

  I winked as soon as the last module was loaded and, a subjective moment later, opened my eyes to the strange new skies of an older universe.

  I was debating the wisdom of returning to Earth when they asked me to transport a few members to another outpost. It didn't take much convincing. After an eighteen-hundred year absence, I knew I'd find Earth's civilization even more incomprehensible than before.

  I winked where they wanted, six hundred light-years back toward Earth, and hoped that the society there was something I could still relate to.

  After that I winked wherever I could, jumping across the light-years and spending as little time as possible in places where the society wasn't particularly understandable or friendly, while relaxing a bit where they were more compatible with my needs. Somewhere along the line I lost track of the real years, wondering if anyone besides Renkinn pilots even worried about that kind of thing.

  The station's interior indicated a high level of technology. After a short trip down a tastefully decorated corridor, I found a warm cubby suffused by dim, yellow-orange light. The color and intensity had to be deliberate, the sort of light that humans loved, and it reminded me of summer evenings when I was romancing Janet and thinking I was in love.

  The drink that floated up from the surface of the table was fizzy, dark, and tasted faintly of cinnamon. It had a kick like caffeinated ethanol, but without the burn.

  As the initial effects of the drink wore off, I tried to think about my place in time. In the last subjective year I'd taken winks from Hullus, out near Hya, a few hundred light years further along the Sagittarius arm, and returned for a second and third trip, each time finding that the inhabitants of Hullus had grown ever stranger in appearance as they genetically adapted themselves to the planet's harsh environment.

  After the third trip to Hullus, I carried a group of whatever-they'd-become to do research in the Omega nebula for a year or two, only to find their data obsolete when they returned.

  That was when I started winking further along the frontier, winking my way to the planet where I sat today, sipping my fizzy cinnamon drink.

  I noticed someone seated in the dark recesses of the place. Another pilot, I assumed.

  "Share a drink?" I suggested. "I'm buying."

  "You want me to share a drink?" a woman's voice answered. "Have you no shame?"

  I wasn't sure how to respond. What the devil was shameful about sharing a drink?

  "No, I'm bloody shameless," I answered. "Come on over."

  I wouldn't have been surprised had one of the statuesque blondes of Rigel or the gilled littoral creatures of Faroff stepped out of the shadows; a lot of Renkinn pilots I ran into seemed to hail from those two worlds. Instead, a diminutive young girl with an olive complexion came out of the dark, bowed deeply, and perched herself on the edge of the facing stool. She had beautiful wide-set brown eyes, was hairless, insofar as I could tell, and wore a strangely cut coverall that failed to conceal her femininity.

  "Tim, just Tim," I introduced myself and extended a hand.

  "Timjus. A strange
name," she answered with a clipped accent. She lifted a hand and pressed her heart. "My appellation and designator is Shuu Penpen. I am of the clade Domit in the habitat of Breezhe."

  "I'm from old Earth, myself. Pleased to meet you," I answered as I lifted my glass.

  "Would you mind not drinking while I am looking at you?" She turned her head away as I nearly choked with surprise. Apparently, drinking in front of someone was a cultural no-no where she came from.

  "I left Earth in the twenty-second century," I said to start the conversation. "You?"

  "I have but a few years of traveling behind me," she replied. "But they have been long winks, and far from my time and place, I'm afraid. I've never reached your 'Eart,' nor do I know when you might have left, but I think you are as lost in time as I am."

  At that point I noticed that she was fiddling quite a bit with her hands. Guessing that she wanted to bring something up but didn't know where to begin, I said, "Something bothering you?"

  "How long have you been winking?" she asked.

  "Eight, maybe ten subjective years, I think. A lot of real time, anyhow."

  "Are you finding that people are changing? The people at the places I've winked to lately are all so . . . so strange."

  "That's the reason I keep traveling farther out," I admitted. "Out here, where the stars are so far apart, it only takes a few trips before the differences become noticeable. Especially when you wink to those planets where adaptations are required. A couple of years ago I had to wink a few littoral 'humans' to some watery planet in these great big, sloshing shuttles. Strange was the word for it all right."

  "You've been taking passengers?"

  That was a weird thing to say. Who didn't take passengers? "Occasionally, though it's been mainly cargo the last few winks." I'd not attached any particular importance to that until now. "Why?"