No sailors were on watch outside George’s cabin or in the corridors beyond. The flight to the amidships hatch was accomplished without spilling a single drop of black blood.They popped the hatch, leaped up. George underwent a succession of pleasant shocks – technological hum to whispering surf, c...
Now I know better. Porquatz, it turns out, is a huge planet. I mean HUGE. Porquatz makes Planet Jupiter look like a bowling ball. It makes Earth look like a marble. So the truth is that only half of Porquatz—the half where my parents decided to live—is the dullest place in...
Aeolus blew from the east, in soft yet ceaseless gusts, and so the crowded company of the Jean-Baptist Lamarck simply drifted, borne by the aether, the better to conserve their fuel. During the flight to Castillo Bracamoros, Chloe had been too frightened to perceive the paradox of flotation in a ...
Our intercourse, I should hasten to report, was entirely of the verbal variety, so if you’re looking for something spicier than banter about Japanese monster movies, skip to the kinky encounter between Darlene and me that I’m planning to include later in this chapter. But for now I feel bound to ...
Life in Tepec became cold to the touch. Citizens fondled their coats, looking for holes to mend. Gardens decayed into formless brown. Chitzals headed for the southern orchards and sustained themselves on frozen, nearly impregnable opos. On the river made of hate, ragged shelves of ice formed and ...
The pulse of the flames, the hurrahs of the crowd, the screams of the heretic, the apocalyptic fragrance—he would not forget these sensations as long as thoughts roved within his skull and blood beat through his veins. So memorable, in sooth, was Isobel Mowbray’s cleansing that, shortly after the...
Vaughn Poffley also stood foursquare against indicting the Almighty, fearing the pre-trial publicity would cost Martin the upcoming election. Martin’s mother, he knew, would have just one thing to say to him—“Your father would not be proud”—and so he didn’t even tell her. Much to his dismay, the ...
I unfasten the delicate lock, turn to a fresh page, and ready my ballpoint pen. Click. Dear Diary, let me say at the outset that I once counted myself among the luckiest of women. Dennis had a lucrative job as a software engineer at Micromega. Our daughter, Angela, loved school and always brought...
Or, to give credit where credit is due, thank William R. Wesgroot for psychic billiards. Had the good ship Fleshpot not come equipped with Dr. Wesgroot’s remarkable invention, we would surely have gone as mad as Vorka victims during our long journey to the Sabik Hydrasteroid Belt. &nb...
Case in point: the Red Cross Knight who dominates Book One of The Faerie Queene, as pious a protagonist as might be imagined, a man whose life’s ambition is to enter orthodoxy’s dictionary—“see also holiness, probity, and St. George”—single-minded even by the norms of allegory. So how does this c...
Futility, futility, all was futility and God’s shattering silence. Seven, that rhythmic digit from Revelation, seven long years since Billy had been in regular communication with heaven: the seraphs’ voices telling him that he and he alone had been elected to bring Jesus back, the white-robed hos...
The only exceptional feature was the smoldering volcano in the distance. Anthony identified it as Catemaco, adding that while its vents had smoked, belched, and oozed continuously since 1914, no one believed it would ever actually blow. Catemaco, he said, was like an aging, fangless, junkyard Dob...
Logic, of course, says a second conception should prove no harder than a first. Hah. Mother Nature can be a sneaky old bitch, something we’ve learned from our twenty-odd years of farming down here in central Pennsylvania. Maybe you’ve driven past our place, Garber Farm, two miles outside of Boals...
Published by arrangement with St. Martin's Press. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology in the United States of America only. CITY OF TRUTH by James Morrow ONE I no longer live in the City of Truth. I have exiled myself from Veritas, from all cities — from ...