Happy New Year, everybody! Ibn Qirtaiba's first issue was published in June 1993 to an audience of about half a dozen readers. Two years later we made our transition to the World Wide Web (becoming one of the first solely Web-based SF fanzines) and as you can see from the table below, the magazine has since gone from strength to strength; tripling the number of issues released between its first year and its most recent. Although I have no idea of the number of readers Ibn Qirtaiba now has (its "hits", although impressive, are a poor guide), there are now over 70 members of the SF SIG, and since they are necessarily restricted to 2% of the population, 3500 readers would have to be a conservative estimate.
| Year | Issues released |
|---|---|
| 1993 | 3 |
| 1994 | 4 |
| 1995 | 3 |
| 1996 | 9 |
| 1997 | 10 |
Whilst it is a daunting task to interest and entertain so many SF fans each month, the task is made easy by the high quality of submissions IQ continues to receive. This issue we conclude Adventures of a Data Organizer by Frederick Rustam, which is the author's second serial for Ibn Qirtaiba. If you're looking for books to read over the New Year break, Fred Noweck's Sci-Fi Corner reviews will be sure to assist you (the ongoing saga with his scanner has been satisfactorily resolved, as you will see). We conclude with a poem Eugenica by acclaimed SF poet Keith Allen Daniels.
I hope you'll continue to enjoy and contribute to Ibn Qirtaiba throughout 1998.
Serial: Adventures of a Data Organizer, part 2 by Frederick Rustam
The story so far: Fearing that Dee, its Leader, is about to order a mass suicide, Brother Robert leaves the datacult, Web Possibilities Ltd., and escapes to the Combat Zone of Terminal City. There, he meets a space dataship Captain and signs onto the Terrinforma as a DO/3d (Data Organizer, Third Class). His supervisor discovers his escape, from WebPoss and informs the Captain, but the ship's master supports the young datajack as a valuable addition to his crew.
Bobby awoke in his bunk to the hooting of an alarm in the corridor outside his compartment. The lower-bunk crewman, an engineer, was on duty. In his skivvies, Bobby dropped to the deck and checked the room's small datamonitor: it displayed a short PIRATE ATTACK alarm notice and advisory... Bobby had been assigned no General Quarters emergency duty, yet. He moved to the port and looked out.
As the Terrinforma rotated, an approaching ship came into view. Bobby squinted at it... On the next rotation, the fast-moving ship displayed a distinctive symbol on its side: a black rectangle with skull-and-crossbones - the traditional emblem of piracy.
In his orientation, he'd been told that the Terrinforma had no defensive weapons. "Out here, armed defense against an agressor is suicide," the crewchief had stated, flatly. Datapirates usually just downloaded a dataship's info, erased it from their victim's storage, and went on their way to peddle it, themselves. Although crews were generally not harmed, the loss of the Terrinforma's precious data would end its cruise. This would greatly annoy Captain Brickbender and his financial backers, to say the least.
The ship's data wasn't even encrypted. The Captain knew that the pirates would just torture crewmembers until one of them revealed what the raiders needed to know to recover and utilize the data.
Despite this reassuring orientation, Bobby decided, then and there, to hide in his locker. He squeezed into the small subcompartment, hoping the boarding pirates wouldn't enter his doorless bunkroom when they saw it was empty of personnel.
Men were in the corridor, and Bobby heard a strange humming sound. Then a beeping superimposed itself on the humming. ("They're using a lifesigns detector!") Too late, he held his breath.
"Somebody's breathing in here." The door to the locker was suddenly yanked open.
The man who confronted a cramped Bobby wore a black bandanna with a skull-and-crossbones design around his forehead. He scowled at Bobby, then checked a plastiphoto in his left hand... He smiled, wickedly.
"Got him!"
A voice beyond the open door said, "Bring him along."
The pirate dragged Bobby from the locker.
Bobby was frog-marched into the Terrinforma's dayroom, where the crewmembers were being held by the pirates. A man with an eyepatch seemed to be in charge of the boarding party. He was standing at the dayroom's bulkhead monitor, overseeing the transfer of data to his ship, the Jolly Jug... He had removed his spacesuit's helmet and had put on his bald head a traditional Terran pirate's hat to mark his status as the officer-in-charge.
("What a cute stereotype,") thought Bobby, who needed a sarcastic thought to balance the shame of his capture. ("I should have guessed they'd have access to the ship's crew-roster and come looking for the missing guy.")
The pirate who'd found Bobby shoved the manacled datadope before the officer.
"Here he is, sir. Found him hidin' in a locker." Everybody in the dayroom seemed to enjoy this revelation - especially DO/1st Schroeder. "He's the one the Cap'n's lookin' for, alright." Schroeder would remember well this remark when the time came for her to crow about it to Brickbender. She would, of course, blame the entire incident on Brother Robert's undesirable presence aboard the Terrinforma.
("Damn Dee... He sure acted fast.") Bobby regretted being unable to radiosearch the Web before Terrinforma had hyperjumped to see if he was already "wanted." Captain Brickbender had accepted him so easily and had been so accommodating that he'd been lulled into a false sense of security.
But he wondered how the Jolly Jug's pirates had learned of his escape from Web Possibilities, Ltd... Had they been in a near-Earth orbit, watching for victim dataships like the Terrinforma, and had they just happened to radiofind his "wanted" notice on the Web?... Or had Dee learned of his new dataship job and hired the orbiting pirates to grab him?
"Send him over," ordered the pirate officer, who returned his gaze to the monitor.
("Like the data,") mused Bobby. ("I'm just another file, now - to be transferred and sold to ...who... Dee, or the highest bidder?")
He didn't bother to assert his rights under the Galactic Human Rights Convention. He doubted the pirates were based on a signatory planet.
Bobby shivered in the pale light of the distant red-giant sun. The memories of his few days as a prisoner on the Jolly Jug were dispersed by the thin, chill wind which blew across the landing field. In his protective suit, he was hustled from the cooling ship to an entrance door in a rockface. The field was barren of anything except portable ground-support equipment for servicing ships.
During his days aboard the Jolly Jug, Bobby's dataskills were again tested, but it was apparent that the pirates were doing the testing for someone else - a datacustomer who needed an organizer. This made it unlikely they intended returning him to WebPoss... Now he'd reached the Jolly Jug's enroute destination, it also seemed unlikely that a customer would require Bobby's datajack skills. There was probably only one enterprise on the whole barren, rocky planet, so there would be no need for him to steal data, here.
Bobby would almost miss the datapirates, who'd treated him well - as something valuable and salable. He'd gotten to know the Captain, a huge man with a pirate's thick, black beard. He'd even learned to like the monotonous bully-beef stew served to crew and "guests".
The door slid noisly open, revealing a lighted tunnel bored deeply into the mountain which loomed above the landing field. Two prosuited guards marched outside to accept the prisoner. They were gray, scaly-skinned types. Despite his mental catalog of known aliens, Bobby couldn't identify them - but named them, anyway. ("Squamatosians.").
Without a word, the alien guards seized Bobby and pushed him into the tunnel. The pirates turned back to their ship which was still crackling in the thin, cold air. The tunnel door closed behind them, ponderously. It signalled his new and uncertain captivity in an unmistakable way.
The guards took Bobby down the rock tunnel past some machinery rooms to a T-intersection. At one end of the new tunnel, Bobby could see an elevator door with a green palmtree painted on it. At the other end, was a wide entrance with decoratively-frosted glass doors. The guards turned toward the latter. When they reached the doors, they pulled them open for their captive to enter.
Inside, the corridor continued, but the floor, walls, and ceiling were coated with plastiglass to seal away rockdust. There were several closed doors on either side. Ahead, at the end of the corridor, a wide doorway shimmered with a containment field, which obscured its interior with a hazy curtain of pulsing energy. ("The Sanctum Sanctorum,") guessed Bobby.
The guards pushed Bobby through one of the side doors into a room with a single desk-mounted dataterminal. Also provided were a narrow bed against a wall, a counter with faucets and a sink, cabinets for storage, and the door to a bathroom. ("Is this my new prison cell?") Without another word, the aliens left, locking the door behind them.
"What am I supposed to do, now?" he asked himself, aloud. His experiences to date provided a probable answer... A sudden vox verified that probability.
"YOU'LL DO WHAT YOU CUSTOMARILY DO, BROTHER ROBERT - ORGANIZE DATA."
The vox, issuing from a small loudspeaker in the deskterminal, made Bobby jump. It was an accentless voice, pitched for maximum aural reception, and in the Universal language of the Terran-influenced region of the galaxy... But who was speaking?
Bobby was speechless for a moment, his mind swirling with guesses.
"Who are you?... How do you know who I am?" The confident answers to his questions were not long in coming.
"I'M YOUR NEW EMPLOYER, AND THIS IS HOW I KNOW OF YOU:"
The monitor beeped and on its display appeared a page of WebPoss's Web site - the one announcing "the loss of our dear Brother Robert," and requesting help in finding him... Bobby was not surprised. The pirates of the Jolly Jug must have transferred this page along with their marketable "guest."
"GO AHEAD, BROTHER ROBERT. USE YOUR SKILLS. THIS IS THE TERRAN WEB YOU KNOW SO WELL... UTILIZE IT FOR US, JUST AS YOU DID FOR DEE."
A bolt of lightning slashed through Bobby's knowledge and experience.
"You mean...?" He paused, then his fingers danced on the keyboard of the deskterminal. On the screen of the monitor appeared the Web front-page of Terminal City Times, his old hometown news resource.
He checked his watch-calendar... The Web page's date was today's.
"Realtime retrieval?" he concluded, uncertainly. "Realtime?!" His questioning voice rose in excitement.
"REALTIME BY MEANS OF ULTRAWAVE, BROTHER ROBERT."
"Wow! Ultrawave!" His shout of discovery reverberated from the spartan surfaces of his cell. For awhile, he forgot that, despite all the light-years he'd traveled, he was still a captive data organizer.
Bobby relaxed - "drooped" better describes his posture - on his soft lounger under the glare of the biodome's overhead lamps. They augmented the feeble red light of the planet's sun, and they emitted enough ultraviolet to have given him a light tan since he'd begun using the place for off-duty relaxation... His quarters were not the dataroom he'd first been taken to, but rather a small, comfortable suite of rooms behind one of the sealed corridor's doors.
"BROTHER ROBERT?" The vox spoke from the speaker in the lounger's small terminal.
("My Master's voice.") "Yes?..." he responded, listlessly.
The novelty of organizing Web data for this barren world's only enterprise had palled in the weeks that Bobby had been here. He'd quickly learned to assist ELMO in his datanauting within the Terran Web - in ultrawave realtime. The work required of him, however, gradually included more of the kind of datajacking he'd done for his old cult. ELMO was a very curious datanaut and gatherer of Terran information.
"YOU SEEM TO BE LOSING YOUR EDGE. YOU'RE NOT HAPPY HERE... AM I CORRECT?"
"Oh, no. I love it here - way out here on this unnamed lump of rock, helping you gad about the Web, organizing data for you... Will I be able to retire back to Earth when I'm too old for this work?"
Bobby had become increasingly sharp in his dealings with ELMO, who never threatened or punished him... Of course, Bobby was careful to obey the vox's ever-polite requests. ELMO's guess was correct: Bobby's initial enthusiasm at being back on the Web in realtime was diminishing, and now seemed insufficient compensation for his captive employment on Redrock, his name for this strange, alien dataworld.
The vox ignored his sarcastic, but relevant question. "I'VE TAKEN STEPS TO IMPROVE YOUR MORALE, BROTHER ROBERT. I'VE BROUGHT YOU A WOMAN - A WOMAN YOU ALREADY KNOW: DO/3d RANAVALONA OF THE DATASHIP TERRINFORMA."
"What?!" Bobby's dismay at ELMO's outrageous action was only slightly tempered by his joy at realizing he would now have a congenial companion in his captivity.
"SHE'S ON HER WAY DOWN HERE, AS I SPEAK."
"You didn't tell her she was to be my woman - did you?"
"I LEFT THE EXPLANATIONS FOR YOU TO MAKE."
"Thanks," Bobby replied, flatly. "She definitely wouldn't want to be characterized as 'his woman.' '...His associate,' maybe."
"Ranny!... Welcome to Redrock."
Bobby arose from the lounger to greet the young woman as she was escorted into the biodome. As attractive as he remembered her, she was still dressed in the uniform of their former employer
"Bobby?!... What's this place?... Why was I brought here?" Her umbrage at her abduction was clearly evident.
He motioned for her to recline on the lounger. "You'd better sit down for the explanation. It won't be terrifically comforting." Slowly - cautiously eyeing Bobby as a possible captor - she sat.
"The guy who runs this enterprise wanted another DO. Apparently, uh, somebody told him you and I were an item, so he had the datapirates bring you here... Please don't blame me. He never checked with me before doing it."
She outthrust her arms. "'Enterprise,' you say?... What kind of enterprise could there be on this barren, worthless planet?"
Bobby shrugged and sat beside her. "I call it 'Redrock.' Giving names to the unknown around here makes me feel better. My guess is that it's some kind of alien station for gathering intelligence on Earth and its colonies. You'll find this hard to believe, but..." He paused, meaningfully.
"Try me," she said.
"They have an ultrawave connection to the Web," he revealed, with lifted eyebrows.
A look of shock replaced her smile. "Our Web?... You're right. I don't believe it. That couldn't be... But it is, isn't it?"
"You'll soon see for yourself. But who 'They' are is a big mystery, so far. Who knows, maybe you can sweettalk the answers out of ELMO."
"Elmo?... Is that the 'enterprise's' honcho?"
"Capital E,L,M,O: Extremely Large Multisensory Organism... It's what I dubbed him. He's the loudspeaker voice in my dataterminal who gives me orders. It's a vox, of course, so I can't tell much about him. I'll say this, though: he's sure interested in Terran customs, but..."
"But what?" She hung on Bobby's every word for the explanation she hoped would explain her abduction.
"I can't even tell if ELMO's an alien like those Squamatosians who escorted you here, or an artificial intelligence acting for an alien world. If he is an AI, he's sure a good one - the champion, whizbang data retriever of the galaxy."
"Well, then, why does he need us?"
"It's mostly a culture thing. There's a lot he doesn't know about Terran culture, and he needs us to explain things to him." Bobby didn't mention the datajacking he was required to do.
"Maybe, together, we can find out the truth about ELMO."
Bobby's expression flashed alarm and a little fear. "Shhhh!... ELMO has ears everywhere. And I doubt he wants to be investigated."
"To hell with that, Bobby. With or without you, I'm going to make trouble. I don't want to waste my life in this damn place. I wasn't reared by a datacult to be obedient, like you were... I'm sorry, Bobby, but I want to see Madagascar again, someday."
Bobby replied, "As a matter of fact, I was discussing my eventual retirement with ELMO when you arrived."
"YOU BOTH MAY RETIRE TO YOUR HOMEWORLD WHEN THIS PROJECT HAS NO FURTHER NEED OF YOU. UNTIL THEN, YOU MUST RESIGN YOURSELF TO YOUR SERVICE WITH 'THE ENTERPRISE.'" So quoted the vox from the lounger's dataterminal.
"See?... I told you," said Bobby, confidently, but sadly.
"I see... I don't like," she said, in grim acceptance.
"Well, Ranny, look at it this way: here, at least, we don't have Eleanor Schroeder on our backs." He grinned, mischievously.
"No," she agreed, glumly. "Here, we have ELMO Schroeder."
Bobby and Ranny were working in the dataroom, when Ranny discovered the sudden mass-suicide of the cultists at Web Possibilities, Ltd.
Another deskterminal had been moved into the room to accommodate Bobby's "woman." At first, ELMO had proposed separate datarooms for his captive organizers, but Bobby had thrown a fit to have his new coworker nearby. The enigmatic datamaster had agreed, and the room had been rearranged for collegial operation. ELMO found that the two captives worked well together, their dataskills synergizing to a new peak of efficiency.
"Bobby! Look at this!" She pointed to her monitor. "The TC Times has a headline about your old cult... I'm afraid it's bad news."
They stared in shock at the page with the story, which read:
"DATACULT MEMBERS COMMIT MASS SUICIDE ... "WebPoss workers apparently followed the advice of their CEO, 'Dee,' and took lethal doses of barbiturates. Dee's body was not among those found at the cult's home, Searchment House. Police are seeking this man, whose real name is Alt Weisskopf. ... "Evidence at the scene indicates the cult's leader felt the time had arrived for the group to transcend their earthly life and jump to a higher plane of existence. ... "The mass suicide was apparently timed to coincide with the advent of the comet Schumann-Levine because a 'heavenly' spaceship was believed by Dee to be accompanying and hiding behind the comet. ... "All the records of Web Possibilities, Ltd. were destroyed. Only their Web site, with a page briefly explaining their sudden 'transcendence', remains. Its URL is www.webposs.com/journey."
Bobby recalled the night Sister Lisa had expressed her faith in Dee, but he found himself beyond grief, now. His suspicions of a connection between the Redrock datagathering enterprise and Web Possibilities, Ltd. increased a quantum jump... He decided it was time to find out if there really was a connection.
"Alright, ELMO," he addressed their unseen master. "I want the truth about you and Web Possibilities, Ltd. I know there's a connection there you haven't revealed." When the datamaster declined to respond to his bluff, Bobby shouted, "Now, ELMO!"
Ranny jumped and stared at him uncomprehendingly. "Bobby, what're you doing?" His response was to put a finger to his lips to request her forbearance.
"WOULD AN EXPLANATION SATISFY YOU AND MAKE YOU A BETTER WORKER, BOBBY?... WILL YOU BE HAPPY HERE ON 'REDROCK' IF I REVEAL MORE ABOUT OUR DATA ENTERPRISE?"
"Yes," he replied. "Definitely."
"VERY WELL. STAND BY, AND YOU'LL HAVE YOUR EXPLANATION."
In the following silence of the dataroom, Bobby and Ranny whispered their speculations, every word of which was picked up by the room's audiosensors. Then, the door to the corridor was thrown open, and a familiar, elderly man stood in the doorway.
Bobby gasped in surprise... "Dee!"
The man smiled benignly, but did not advance farther into the room. Behind him, two Squamatosian guards stood, watchfully.
"Not Dee, Bobby - I'm F," replied the man who looked exactly like Bobby's old cult leader. "I haven't been transported from Earth."
Bobby strained to make sense of what the man had said. "'Eph?' - you mean, like, Ephraim?"
"No... F - as in Agent F. Dee was actually Agent D... He cleverly modified his designation into an acceptable Terran name."
Bobby glanced at Ranny, who sat between him and the apparition in the doorway. Her expression seemed to verify his own conclusion.
"You're an android, then." he said. "And so was Dee."
"No. We're not androids. Man-machines wouldn't fool Terrans. We're cyborgs - cloned humans, augmented with bioelectronic implants to assure the faithful execution of our duties."
"So, Agent D did his duty by executing the faithful workers of your Terran enterprise?..." inquired Ranny. "...In effect."
"It was time to liquidate WebPoss. The Terran datapolice were getting closer to our operation. We may have made a mistake in financing the enterprise, locally, by selling jacked data."
("Dee bribed some datacops to keep him informed.") Bobby now realized how little he'd known about WebPoss, despite his being a trusted member of the cult. He came to the point, quickly.
"Who's behind all this, then?... Some aliens, I guess... Are they planning to invade the Terran Federation?"
Agent F explained, "I assure you Earth is safe from invasion by us. We have a civilization of our own. We're merely studying the Terran phemonenon for ... useful things. Humans are among the most resourceful beings in the known galaxy. There's much to be learned from them."
"We're curious, too. How about if we study you?" asked Ranny. Her tone of voice hinted that a new direction of datajacking might now occur on Redrock. "Or just return us to Earth, and we'll keep your secret."
"We'll even work for you there," added Bobby, hastily. "After all, WebPoss was just a part of a larger outfit. I worked for a D, and I can work for an F, too - without WebPoss."
"...In Madagascar," suggested Ranny. "It's a good place to avoid the datapolice. We could start up a new outfit and call it ...say... `WebLemurs.' Since lemur is Latin for ghost, that'd be appropriate."
The cyborg with Dee's face smiled at this suggestion.
"We'll consider it." Then, he turned and closed the door behind him.
"What do you think, Bobby?... Do we have a chance for a new deal?"
Bobby held up crossed fingers. "Maybe," he drawled. "If not, we'll have plenty of time to get acquainted with good-ole Redrock... If I die here first, will you perform the old Malagasy rite of famadihana for me, Ranny?"
"Sure. I rewrapped my grandfather twice. I can do it for you, too, here in the biodome, of course. This is the only place on the whole damn planet with enough soil to bury you in."
Then, her pretty face took on a serious expression. "You know, Bobby, something he said bothers me - or rather, something he didn't say."
"What's that?"
"Well, if Agent D is in hiding on Earth, and we just met Agent F..." Ranny stared suspiciously at Bobby. "...Who is Agent E?"
Bobby stared back at Ranny. Was she accusing him, or trying to tell him something?
A few long seconds passed, as they squinted at each other. Slowly, they regained their smiles.
"It's not me!" they exclaimed, in unison.
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Today, there will be a slight departure from my usual format. I just saw the movie Starship Troopers based on Heinlein's book of the same name. It is fortunate that Heinlein is dead already, because this would have killed him. He always had trouble with the people in Hollywood, changing his work around. Well, they did it again. If you haven't read the book (and I don't see how that is possible as veteran sci-fi fanatics), it will be confusing, as the movie runs like a recruiting poster. Most of it looks like it was pulled off of the future version of the Internet. Build-up that Heinlein put in the book was left out of the movie. The historic background behind the Federation was reduced to one line in the movie. If you are into blood-and-guts movies, you might like this, but I for one didn't.
I had heard last year of a project to make Stranger in a Strange Land into a movie, starring Tom Hanks as Valentine Smith, the Man From Mars. After what Hollywood did to Starship, I'm just as glad that they didn't do it.
On the bright side, David Brin's book, The Postman, is coming out in December starring Kevin Costner in the title role. I just hope that they (the great ubiquitous They) don't mess this one up or I may just stop going to sci-fi movies.
At the other extreme is The Man Who Knew Too Little, a movie starring Bill Murray. It starts out with Murray going to England to visit his brother for his (Murray's) birthday... without telling his brother that he's coming. The brother has other plans for that night so he purchases a ticket to Theater of Life, a role playing street theater game which puts the audience into the action. Bill is supposed to go to a specific telephone kiosk at a certain time to start the action. He gets there early and gets the wrong phone call... one intended for an assassin... and goes to the wrong address (the assassin gets the Theater of Life call, with the expected results).
From there, Bill is drawn into the world of spy-vs-spy (which somehow, he never clues into the fact that it's all for real). He's having a ball while people are dropping like flies around him (he thinks that they are really good actors).
I enjoyed watching it even though it was panned by the critics (maybe even because it was panned). Go see it. It was fun.
Ok, here are this month's books. They are:
Mercycle is a strange one involving
alternate worlds, a trek across the ocean bottom on bicycles, and a race to save Earth
from destruction (secretly). The agent from the alternate Earth is just about the last one
you would expect (and don't expect me to tell you who... that would spoil it for you).
Personally, I thought it was reminiscent of Heinlein's juvenile stories... light on plot and character development and long on... well, not long on anything, really.... I guess it was more of a mindless exercise in getting a party of strangers across the ocean floor (and I still don't know exactly why) to meet Chinese Mer-people. This one is kind of ambiguous. I give it a 4....
A Wizard in Mind is the first
(chronologically) in the chronicles of Magnus D'Armand, eldest son of Rod
Gallowglass, the Wizard in Spite of Himself. Magnus has decided that he wants to Right The
Wrongs Of The Galaxy (can you hear the capital letters?). So he takes the spaceship given
to him by his aunts and uncles (they are very rich) and goes gallivanting around
the galaxy looking for planets that offend his personal ideas of What-Is-Right. What is
more, he has the power to do it, having inherited psionic power from both parents.
Stasheff is branching out to include the members of Gallowglasses family in the continuing adventures of The Wizard... I hope it works out. Meanwhile, I'm still looking for the next book in Stasheff's Starship Troupers series....
A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born covers
the origins of Slippery Jim DiGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat. His early training in
thievery, his childhood on the planet Bit O'Heaven, his first job in the porcuswine burger
franchise... the usual thing that creates a master criminal.
If you haven't read any of the Stainless Steel Rat stories (and I don't see how you could have missed reading them at some time) Slippery Jim was captured in the first book of the series and 'rehabilitated'. They (the establishment) operate on the theory of 'send a thief to catch a thief'... they made him a cop... an elite undercover operative but still a policeman. Unfortunately for his boss's blood pressure, the 'rehabilitation' didn't entirely take...which makes for a very funny series. Read them all. That's an order!
Don't Forget Your Spacesuit Dear
addresses a subject that is not seen very often in sci-fi... Mother. This collection of
short-stories is all about Mother and how she relates to the "heroes" of each
story. From Robert Asprin (You Never Call) to Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (Don't Go Out In
Holy Underwear) each author takes you through his or her version of Mother's reaction to
the messes that the heroes get into.
Most of them are good, a couple are really good, some are stinkers that I don't know why they were included in the anthology. Buy it anyway for the really good ones.
Now that that is out of the way, we are still looking for your responses to our reader survey that we began last month. Send your emails to: Fred@sf.sig.au.mensa.org.
Get on the bandwagon and make your vote count! Meanwhile, we will be putting all of your responses through our Super-Computer to see what you really think. See you next month....
Random Thoughts: Health Tip
Have you ever been plagued by multiple sneezes... the kind that just won't quit? Here's a tip for you: when you feel the sneeze coming on (and you know when that is) press your index or middle finger into the juncture of your fulstrum (that's that little groove thingy under your nose ) and the center cartilage of your nose. The impulse to sneeze will disappear. Really. You should try it.
Ok, so it's difficult to remember this when you are in the middle of a sneezing jag, but blow your nose and try it already. It works.
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We donned the integs,
airtight, skintight,
feeling as always
unsuited for the job.
The cryos, human vectors
frozen with all their maladies,
all their microbes from E. coli to caries,
rank on rank and tier on tier
of old, forgotten families
antedating Eugenica,
were fodder now for the engines'
bright inferno. Like ancient forebears
stripping out asbestos,
we wheeled them on their gurneys
to a brighter future in space,
cracking wise to pass the time away.
"Corpsicles, that's what Niven
calls them. Some red, some white.
Well below the glass transition
temperature. Dropped from a height,
they'd shatter like the finest china dolls
your grandmother's granny collected."
A pretty ugly one shivered nicely
when we dropped her accidentally,
a neoplastic mosaic
of lilac and cerise follicles.
"Perfect conchoidal fracture.
Yeah, you could break someone's heart
doing this kind of work."
"And catch a disease
while you're at it. As arms - and legs -
for biological warfare,
these things could make us trillions!"
"There hasn't been a war
on this deck for generations,
numbnuts. But there will be
if the wicked witch of the west
starts melting all over the place."
Decon lasted a week, the toughest
part of a tough job.
Getting laid's even tougher.