Worlds Read online

  Worlds

  by

  Eric Flint

  Table of Contents

  WORLDS

  Eric Flint

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

  Copyright © 2009 by Eric Flint

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-9142-7

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-9142-9

  Cover art by Tom Kidd

  First printing, February 2009

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Flint, Eric.

  Worlds / Eric Flint.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 1-4165-9142-7

  1. Fantasy fiction, American. 2. Science fiction, American. 3. Alternative histories (Fiction), American. I. Title.

  PS3556.L548W67 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008049710

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To the memory of my mother,

  Mary Jeanne McCormick Flint

  Born February 17, 1926

  Died July 7, 2008

  BAEN BOOKS by ERIC FLINT

  The Ring of Fire series:

  1632 by Eric Flint

  1633 by Eric Flint & David Weber

  1634: The Baltic War by Eric Flint & David Weber

  Ring of Fire ed. by Eric Flint

  1634: The Galileo Affair by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis

  Grantville Gazette ed. by Eric Flint

  Grantville Gazette II ed. by Eric Flint

  1634: The Ram Rebellion by Eric Flint with Virginia DeMarce et al.

  1634: The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint with Virginia DeMarce

  1635: The Cannon Law with Andrew Dennis

  Grantville Gazette III ed. by Eric Flint

  Ring of Fire II ed. by Eric Flint

  Grantville Gazette IV ed. by Eric Flint

  1635: The Dreeson Incident by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce

  With Dave Freer:

  Rats, Bats & Vats • The Rats, The Bats & the Ugly

  Pyramid Scheme • Pyramid Power

  Slow Train to Arcturus

  With Mercedes Lackey & Dave Freer:

  The Shadow of the Lion • This Rough Magic

  With David Drake:

  The Tyrant

  The Belisarius Series

  An Oblique Approach • In the Heart of Darkness

  Belisarius: Thunder at Dawn • Destiny's Shield • Fortune's Stroke

  Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide • The Tide of Victory

  The Dance of Time • Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset (forthcoming)

  Joe's World series:

  The Philosophical Strangler • Forward the Mage (with Richard Roach)

  Standalone Titles

  Mother of Demons

  Crown of Slaves (with David Weber)

  The Course of Empire (with K.D. Wentworth)

  Boundary (with Ryk E. Spoor)

  Mountain Magic (with Ryk E. Spoor, David Drake & Henry Kuttner)

  PREFACE

  As an author, I'm almost a pure novelist. By good fortune, I happened to become a professional writer at a time when the market for science fiction and fantasy had become completely dominated by novels—and series, at that, not even stand-alone novels. That worked very nicely for me personally, since novels—especially series—are my natural inclination as a writer.

  But that's not really why I work almost entirely in long-form writing, it's just good luck. I'd have done the same thing forty or fifty years ago when science fiction and fantasy was a predominantly short-form genre. Even though, in all likelihood, I'd never have been able to make a living as a writer, which I can do today.

  It's just the way my brain works, that's all. When I first started writing fiction, like most aspiring authors, I tried to write short fiction. That's because I thought that it'd be much easier to get professionally published with short stories than with novels.

  That's not actually true, today, as I discovered soon enough. If anything, there's less competition for novels than there is for short fiction. True enough, a typical novel publishing house will receive hundreds of manuscripts from unpublished authors every year, from which they will only select a literal handful. But a major commercial F&SF magazine will get that many submissions every month—from which they will select perhaps one or two from unpublished authors, if they select any at all.

  The big drawback to launching a writing career with novels, or trying to, isn't actually the level of competition. It's that an aspiring writer obviously has to commit a far greater amount of time and effort to writing a novel than a short story. You can write a short story in days. Writing a novel, for all but the very fastest writers, takes several months—and can easily take a year or two, if you're working a full-time job.

  The problem I always had with short fiction is that I simply couldn't start telling a story until I'd gotten the setting and background very well worked out. And once I'd done that and started writing, I invariably found myself writing a "short story" that was actually a novel in disguise—and would work far better as a novel in the first place. The only exceptions were a few short stories I wrote with a purely humorous purpose.

  So, finally, I accepted the inevitable. I stopped trying to write short fiction and concentrated instead entirely on writing novels. And that's how my career got started. I'd published five novels and had several more under contract before I even tried to write short fiction again.

  The reason I did, then, was because David Drake commissioned me to write a novella for an anthology (Foreign Legions, published in 2001) that was based in his Ranks of Bronze setting. Any professional writer hates to turn down work, following the principle that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. So, despite my misgivings, I accepted the commission.

  At that point, an interesting thing happened. I discovered that I didn't have any trouble writing that novella—"Carthago Delenda Est," which is included in this volume—because David had already developed the setting and background. I found it quite easy to situate myself in an existing universe and simply figure out a story that would work just fine, despite being much shorter than my normal inclination.

  A short time later, David Weber commissioned another story from me, this one to be included in an anthology of stories set in the universe of his very popular Honor Harrington series. In this instance, Dave wanted either a long novella or a short novel, not the short novella that Drake had commissioned.

  The end result turned out to be the short novel "From the Highlands," which is also included in this volume. And, again, I made the same discovery. As long as the setting was already established, I had no trouble writing in any length from short story on up. Within a couple of years, I'd written several other pieces, most of them set in my own 1632 universe—the shortest of which is only three thousand words long. (That's "Portraits," also included herein.)

  Once the logjam got broken, I wound up writing quite a bit of short fiction. Not as much, to be sure, as I wrote novels. But, eventually, I realized that I'd written enough short fiction to produce, if collected together, a very hefty anthology. So I proposed to Jim Baen that Baen Books produce such an anthology, and he accepted.

  The
result, you hold in your hand. This is something of an oddball collection of short fiction, I admit. The typical such collection is of a number of unrelated short stories, each of which stands entirely on its own. Whereas almost all of my short fiction is set in an existing universe—usually a series of my own, but sometimes that of another author—and many of the stories are related more directly still to novels or other stories in that series.

  Still, I think every one of these stories can be read and enjoyed on its own. And it's my hope, of course, that if any reader of this anthology finds their interest being taken by one or another of the stories in it, they'll be inspired to investigate the novels in which that universe or universes are more fully developed.

  So, welcome to my worlds.

  Eric Flint

  September 2008

  THE BELISARIUS SERIES

  Author's note:

  This is the fourth version of this story. I originally wrote it as a novella to be included in the anthology Warmasters, published by Baen Books in 2002. After the hardcover edition appeared in May of that year, I decided that the story would be improved by adding a penultimate episode just before the existing ending. That episode was included in the version that was reissued in the mass market edition of Warmasters, which came out in February 2004.

  In 2005, when I sat down to write the final novel in the Belisarius series, The Dance of Time, my original intention was to include "Islands" as an appendix to the novel, since the story serves in some respects as a bridge between the fifth volume (The Tide of Victory) and the last one. But my co-author Dave Drake convinced me that it would be better if I wove the various episodes of "Islands" into The Dance of Time as one of the subplots. So, I did so, polishing and slightly expanding the existing story. (In the novel subplot, I also continued the later adventures of Calopodius and Anna. But those events are not integral to this story, which stands on its own, so they're not included here.)

  So that was the third version—and this is the fourth, which is the reassembly of the story as a stand-alone novella for this anthology, which I did by using the later and improved version I wrote for the novel.

  When all is said and done, I still think the same thing I thought when I first wrote the story. It's probably the best piece of short fiction I've ever written—certainly in some respects—and it's one of the best things I've ever written in any length. The fact that the story can handle being shaped and re-shaped so often is simply a reflection of that. The one thing all good stories have in common is that they are very, very tough.

  Islands

  1

  Bukkur Island, on the Indus river

  He dreamed mostly of islands, oddly enough.

  He was sailing, now, in one of his father's pleasure crafts. Not the luxurious barge-in-all-but-name-and-glitter which his father himself preferred for the family's outings into the Golden Horn, but in the phaselos which was suited for sailing in the open sea. Unlike his father, for whom sailing expeditions were merely excuses for political or commercial transactions, Calopodius had always loved sailing for its own sake.

  Besides, it gave him and his new wife something to do besides sit together in stiff silence.

  Calopodius' half-sleeping reverie was interrupted. Wakefulness came with the sound of his aide-de-camp Luke moving through the tent. The heaviness with which Luke clumped about was deliberate, designed to allow his master to recognize who had entered his domicile. Luke was quite capable of moving easily and lightly, as he had proved many times in the course of the savage fighting on Bukkur Island. But the man, in this as so many things, had proven to be far more subtle than his rough and muscular appearance might suggest.

  "It's morning, young Calopodius," Luke announced. "Time to clean your wounds. And you're not eating enough."

  Calopodius sighed. The process of tending the wounds would be painful, despite all of Luke's care. As for the other—

  "Have new provisions arrived?"

  There was a moment's silence. Then, reluctantly: "No."

  Calopodius let the silence lengthen. After a few seconds, he heard Luke's own heavy sigh. "We're getting very low, truth to tell. Ashot hasn't much himself, until the supply ships arrive."

  Calopodius levered himself up on his elbows. "Then I will eat my share, no more." He chuckled, perhaps a bit harshly. "And don't try to cheat, Luke. I have other sources of information, you know."

  "As if my hardest job of the day won't be to keep half the army from parading through this tent," snorted Luke. Calopodius felt the weight of Luke's knees pressing into the pallet next to him, and, a moment later, winced as the bandages over his head began to be removed. "You're quite the soldiers' favorite, lad," added Luke softly. "Don't think otherwise."

  In the painful time that followed, as Luke scoured and cleaned and rebandaged the sockets that had once been eyes, Calopodius tried to take refuge in that knowledge.

  It helped. Some.

  "Are there any signs of another Malwa attack coming?" he asked, some time later. Calopodius was now perched in one of the bastions his men had rebuilt after an enemy assault had overrun it—before, eventually, the Malwa had been driven off the island altogether. That had required bitter and ferocious fighting, however, which had inflicted many casualties upon the Roman defenders. His eyes had been among those casualties, ripped out by shrapnel from a mortar shell.

  "After the bloody beating we gave 'em the last time?" chortled one of the soldiers who shared the bastion. "Not likely, sir!"

  Calopodius tried to match the voice to a remembered face. As usual, the effort failed of its purpose. But he took the time to engage in small talk with the soldier, so as to fix the voice itself in his memory. Not for the first time, Calopodius reflected wryly on the way in which possession of vision seemed to dull all other human faculties. Since his blinding, he had found his memory growing more acute along with his hearing. A simple instinct for self-preservation, he imagined. A blind man had to remember better than a seeing man, since he no longer had vision to constantly jog his lazy memory.

  After his chat with the soldier had gone on for a few minutes, the man cleared his throat and said diffidently: "You'd best leave here, sir, if you'll pardon me for saying so. The Malwa'll likely be starting another barrage soon." For a moment, fierce good cheer filled the man's voice: "They seem to have a particular grudge against this part of our line, seeing's how their own blood and guts make up a good part of it."

  The remark produced a ripple of harsh chuckling from the other soldiers crouched in the fortifications. That bastion had been one of the most hotly contested areas when the Malwa launched their major attack the week before. Calopodius didn't doubt for a moment that when his soldiers repaired the damage to the earthen walls they had not been too fastidious about removing all the traces of the carnage.

  He sniffed tentatively, detecting those traces. His olfactory sense, like his hearing, had grown more acute also.

  "Must have stunk, right afterward," he commented.

  The same soldier issued another harsh chuckle. "That it did, sir, that it did. Why God invented flies, the way I look at it."

  Calopodius felt Luke's heavy hand on his shoulder. "Time to go, sir. There'll be a barrage coming, sure enough."

  In times past, Calopodius would have resisted. But he no longer felt any need to prove his courage, and a part of him—a still wondering, eighteen-year-old part—understood that his safety had become something his own men cared about. Alive, somewhere in the rear but still on the island, Calopodius would be a source of strength for his soldiers in the event of another Malwa onslaught. Spiritual strength, if not physical; a symbol, if nothing else. But men—fighting men, perhaps, more than any others—live by such symbols.

  So he allowed Luke to guide him out of the bastion and down the rough staircase which led to the trenches below. On the way, Calopodius gauged the steps with his feet.

  "One of those logs is too big," he said, speaking firmly, but trying to keep any critical edge ou
t of the words. "It's a waste, there. Better to use it for another fake cannon."

  He heard Luke suppress a sigh. And will you stop fussing like a hen? was the content of that small sound. Calopodius suppressed a laugh. Luke, in truth, made a poor "servant."

  "We've got enough," replied Luke curtly. "Twenty-odd. Do any more and the Malwa will get suspicious. We've only got three real ones left to keep up the pretense."

  As they moved slowly through the trench, Calopodius considered the problem and decided that Luke was right. The pretense was probably threadbare by now, anyway. When the Malwa finally launched a full-scale amphibious assault on the island that was the centerpiece of Calopodius' diversion, they had overrun half of it before being beaten back. When the survivors returned to the main Malwa army besieging the city of Sukkur across the Indus, they would have reported to their own top commanders that several of the "cannons" with which the Romans had apparently festooned their fortified island were nothing but painted logs.