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fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did.
Gene Trimble looked at the clean and loaded gun on his desk. Well, why not? .
. .
And he ran out of the office shouting, Bentley, listen, I ve got the answer .
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. .
And he stood up slowly and left the office shaking his head. This was the
answer, and it wasn t any good. The suicides, murders, casual crimes would
continue. . . .
And he suddenly laughed and stood up. Ridiculous! Nobody dies for a
philosophical point! . . .
And he reached for the intercom and told the man who answered to bring him a
sandwich and some coffee. . . .
And picked the gun off the newspapers, looked at it for a long moment, then
dropped it in the drawer. His hands began to shake. On a world line very close
to this one . . .
And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head and fired. The
hammer fell on an empty chamber.
fired. The gun jerked up and blasted a hole in the ceiling.
fired.
The bullet tore a furrow in his scalp.
took off the top of his head.
Greg Bear
The topics of Greg Bear s science fiction have ranged from nanotechnology run
amok in
Blood
Music, to the translation of souls into awesome energy fields in the SF-horror
hybrid
Psycholone, and future evolution in
Darwin s Radio.
He is the author of the Songs of Earth and
Power heroic diptych, comprised of
The Infinity Concerto and
The Serpent Mage
, and two collections of short fiction, The Wind from a Burning Woman and
Tangents, which include his stories Hardfought and Blood Music, each of
which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Renowned for his hard science-fiction epics, Bear has written the trilogy that
includes
Legacy, Eon
, and
Eternity
, which features a multiplicity of alternate worlds and timelines accessed
through the interior of a hollow asteroid. Novels of equally impressive scope
include the alien contact story
The
Forge of God and its sequel, Anvil of Stars;
the nanotechnology opus
Queen of Angels
, and its follow-up, Slant
; and the Nebula Award winning
Moving Mars, which chronicles the fifty-year history of Earth s Mars colony
and its revolt against the mother planet. Bear has also written
Dinosaur Summer, a sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle s
The Lost World
, and
Foundation and
Chaos
, which builds on the concepts of Isaac Asimov s Foundation trilogy.
THROUGH ROAD NO WHITHER
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Greg Bear
THE LONG BLACKMERCEDESrumbled out of the fog on the road south from Dijon,
moisture running in cold trickles across its windshield. Horst von Ranke moved
the military pouch to one side and carefully read the maps spread on his lap,
eyeglasses perched low on his nose, while
Waffen Schutzstaffel Oberleutnant Albert Fischer drove. Thirty-five
kilometers, von Ranke said under his breath. No more.
We are lost, Fischer said. We ve already come thirty-six.
Not quite that many. We should be there any minute now.
Fischer nodded and then shook his head. His high cheekbones and long, sharp
nose only accentuated the black uniform with silver death s heads on the high,
tight collar. Von Ranke wore a broad-striped gray suit; he was an
undersecretary in the Propaganda Ministry, now acting as a courier. They might
have been brothers, yet one had grown up in Czechoslovakia, the other in the
Ruhr; one was the son of a coal miner, the other of a brewer. They had met and
become close friends in Paris, two years before.
Wait, von Ranke said, peering through the drops on the side window. Stop.
Fischer braked the car and looked in the direction of von Ranke s long finger.
Near the roadside, beyond a copse of young trees, was a low thatch-roofed
house with dirty gray walls, almost hidden by the fog.
Looks empty, von Ranke said.
It is occupied; look at the smoke, Fischer said. Perhaps somebody can tell
us where we are.
They pulled the car over and got out, von Ranke leading the way across a mud
path littered with wet straw. The hut looked even dirtier close up. Smoke rose
in a darker brown-gray twist from a hole in the peak of the thatch. Fischer
nodded at his friend and they cautiously approached. Over the crude wooden
door letters wobbled unevenly in some alphabet neither knew, and between them
they spoke nine languages. Could that be Rom? von Ranke asked, frowning. It
does look familiar
Slavic Rom.
Gypsies? Romany don t live in huts like this, and besides, I thought they
were rounded up long ago.
That s what it looks like, von Ranke said. Still, maybe we can share some
language, if only
French.
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