Lost Among the Stars Read online

  Praise for Lost Among the Stars

  “Di Filippo is like gourmet potato chips to me. I can never eat just one of his stories.”

  —Harlan Ellison

  “Out of a rich impasto of language, a story that is sensual, sexual, and hot takes shape around one of the most engaging heroines since Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy.”

  —Samuel Delany on A Mouthful of Tongues

  “A ruthless fantasy of aggressive sexuality and archaic intentions.”

  —A. A. Attanasio on A Mouthful of Tongues

  “Fluid, fantastic, rich with menace and heat, A Mouthful of Tongues is a run amok past the limits of the human, Eros the Jaguar with claws intact.”

  —Kathe Koja on A Mouthful of Tongues

  “This collection, Ribofunk, stands as the field’s madcap Dubliners of the biogenetic revolution.”

  —Michael Bishop on Ribofunk

  “Ribofunk is great science fiction: wildly inventive, warmly human, culturally relevant, and deeply funny. Paul Di Filippo does dazzling new tricks with English. And then he puts the wonderful language and the wild science together … and the whole fractal exfoliation leads to the utterly wonderful Ribofunk. The book of the year.”

  —Rudy Rucker on Ribofunk

  “Fractal Paisleys channel surfs postmodern apocalypse brilliantly.”

  —Jonathan Lethem

  “An often genuinely funny mixture of Raymond Carver, Harry Harrison, and Douglas Adams.”

  —Booklist on Fractal Paisleys

  “Di Filippo is the spin doctor of SF—and it is a powerful medicine he brews.”

  —Brian Aldiss

  “Paul Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy is the literary equivalent of Max Ernst’s collages of 19th-century steel-engravings, spooky, haunting, hilarious.”

  —William Gibson

  “Strange Trades is a splendid collection … witty, thoughtful, accessible … the book’s finest story … has a humanity worthy of Dickens or Hardy.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “Vibrant, nervy, and full of gloriously wiggy language, Ribofunk is anything but the same old stuff.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “It’s like Tom Robbins’ classic Even Cowgirls Get the Blues recast in the hands of gonzo mathematician Rudy Rucker as a kind of ontological daytrip.”

  —Locus on Fuzzy Dice

  “An author who genuinely comes close to defying all attempts at description. A true original.”

  —Infinity Plus

  “In terms of composition, narrative description and voice, Di Filippo is well nigh masterful.”

  —SF Site on A Year in the Linear City

  “One absolute knock-out story … that is among the most exciting pieces of fiction I’ve read in years.”

  —Cory Doctorow on Wikiworld

  “Even when Di Filippo does make use of more common images or tropes, it’s with a disturbingly original spin.”

  —Gary Wolfe on Little Doors

  “Paul Di Filippo’s short fiction has almost always been right there on the edge, pushing at the borders of SF, combining some pretty wild speculation with biting satire, sharply crafted prose, a seriously disturbed sense of humor, and consistently good writing.”

  —Don D’Ammassa on Babylon Sisters

  Book Description

  In this astonishing, variegated assortment of tales, award-winning author Paul Di Filippo covers all the themes and modes he is best known for, and ventures into new territory as well.

  —Visit a hermetic city where beauty is the only currency.

  —Experience a steampunk fable in which nothing is what it first seems, and a young man’s future rests on finding his true father.

  —Hang out with the techno-savvy, social-media gypsies who form the new elite in the not-too-distant future.

  —Ride a wild ribofunk express train into the badlands where a man’s skin is not his own.

  —Experience a counterfactual World War II where victory is achieved by amazing rays.

  —Visit a haunted Italian city where the Neolithic and the present live side-by-side, and a hero who falls in love with a goddess and who must battle her ancient foe.

  —Visit an Orwellian future redeemed only by the imagination and love of a tortured dissenter.

  These are just some of the uncanny tales contained in this collection, incorporating comedy and tragedy, laughter and tears!

  Paul Di Filippo

  Kindle Edition – 2017

  WordFire Press

  wordfirepress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61475-465-7

  Copyright © 2016 Paul Di Filippo

  “City of Beauty, City of Scars” first appeared in Impossible Futures, 2013.

  “The Kings of Mount Golden” first appeared in Clockwork Fairy Tales, 2013.

  “Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy: A Love Story” first appeared in Asimov’s, 2013.

  “Desperados of the Badlands” first appeared in Analog, 2013.

  “Wavehitcher” first appeared in Nature, 2013.

  “Life in the Carbyne Age” first appeared in Omni Reboot, 2013.

  “The Via Panisperna Boys in ‘Operation Harmony’” first appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2014.

  “Providence 2034” first appeared in The College Hill Independent, 2014.

  “Ghostless” first appeared in The Monkey’s Other Paw, 2014.

  “Chasing the Queen of Sassi” first appeared as an ebook from APT Basilicata, 2014.

  “The Garden of Pareidolia” appears here for the first time.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover design by Duong Covers

  Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock

  Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

  Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

  www.RuneWright.com

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  Published by

  WordFire Press, an imprint of

  WordFire, Inc.

  PO Box 1840

  Monument, CO 80132

  Contents

  Praise for Lost Among the Stars

  Book Description

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Let Me Count the Days

  City of Beauty, City of Scars

  The Kings of Mount Golden

  Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy:

  Desperados of the Badlands

  Wavehitcher

  Life in the Carbyne Age

  The Via Panisperna Boys in “Operation Harmony”

  Providence 2034

  Ghostless

  Chasing the Queen of Sassi

  The Garden of Pareidolia

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Other WordFire Press Titles

  Introduction

  by Robert Silverberg

  Anyone who calls a story “The Emperor of Gondwanaland,” as Paul Di Filippo did some years back, is going to be a hero of mine forever. Gondwanaland is one of my favorite places on this planet—one that I long to
visit, but never will, because it hasn’t existed for hundreds of millions of years. It is the name geologists give to the primordial continent that once stretched far across the Southern Hemisphere until vast subterranean forces compelled it to split apart, forming what now are South America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. I love simplicity, perhaps because there has been so little of it in my own busy life, and I think it would be wondrously simple if we had one great Gondwanaland down there instead of all those messy little continents and sub-continents. So I applauded when I saw the bumper sticker, “Reunite Gondwanaland,” on a passing car in the very political-minded town where I live, and one of my own stories, set in the extremely unrecent past, was called “Christmas in Gondwanaland.” That Paul Di Filippo would write a Gondwanaland story, and even make it the title story of a collection of his work, met with my heartiest approval. And here, now, we have the latest Di Filippo story collection, another cause for rejoicing.

  Providence-based Paul Di Filippo has been a subtle, shifty, subversive presence in science fiction now since the mid-1980s. (Though the start of his career dates from a story published in 1977.) In a host of short stories and a dozen or so of novels he has toyed with genre conventions, not only standing them on their heads but deftly rotating them through six or seven dimensions, resulting in a body of work that is challenging, stimulating, and vastly entertaining. There’s nobody else like him in the field: Sui generis is the right term for him. Yet for all his subversive habits he has remained, beneath all the playfulness, faithful to the set of concepts and attitudes that constitute true science fiction. He fools around a lot, yes, but he writes the real stuff nevertheless.

  Here he is now with a new collection of his work—eleven stories, one of them published here for the first time, the others drawn from a wide assortment of venues. Three of them come from the classic Big Three of science-fiction magazines, Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Another appeared in the venerable British scientific magazine, Nature. But the rest saw their first publication in such widely (and wildly) varied sources as The Monkey’s Other Paw, Clockwork Fables, and The College Hill Independent. He does get around. All of them will repay your reading time. But I note three in particular that caught my fancy. “Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy: A Love Story,” for one, a story that begins with a deliberately overloaded paragraph that is not so much a narrative hook as it is a narrative bludgeon. Of course Di Filippo knows better than to begin a story with a single intricate sentence about a dozen lines long, and that’s the whole point of his doing it. But once the tongue is out of his cheek he goes on to tell a story that does indeed explore the consequences of its extrapolative premise in a way that would satisfy any old-fashioned purist.

  He does it again in “Chasing the Queen of Sassi,” which opens with another of his outrageously overstuffed narrative hooks, and wanders in the most astonishingly discursive directions before finding its way home to the precisely proper place. And then there is “Desperadoes of the Badlands,” a story of such frenetic inventiveness that it leaves one gasping—and cheering.

  Sui generis, I called him, which is my fancy way of saying that he’s one of a kind. He is our ambassador from Gondwanaland. Read him. Honor him. Cherish his work.

  —Robert Silverberg

  July, 2016

  Dedication

  To Deborah Newton, as we stand halfway to forever

  Let Me Count the Days

  By my presumably accurate inventory, this is my thirty-sixth published book. (I am not including different editions of extant titles here, nor such items as Families Are Murder, which collects into an omnibus my two mystery novels written with Michael Bishop and previously published separately.) I think having thirty-six volumes out in the world under one’s name is a fairly impressive accomplishment. (Of course, imagining that those books contain high-quality material could redound even more to one’s credit.)

  As writers do when they want to reassure themselves that they have been working hard and not just playing with Facebook all day, I try to parcel out the number of books across my entire career to see just how “productive” I’ve been. But that’s where the trouble starts.

  When did my career begin exactly?

  I sold my first story in 1977, when I was still in college. Maybe my career began then.

  But I did not focus intensely on my writing with the goal of becoming a professional until 1982. Maybe that was the real start of my career.

  But I did not manage to break into print again until 1985, when I sold two stories almost simultaneously to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Twilight Zone Magazine. (Thanks, Ed Ferman and Ted Klein!) True career opener?

  Hold on though! I did not publish my first book until The Steampunk Trilogy in 1995. Then surely that’s got to be the real start of my career-between-hardcovers.

  So depending on which baseline you use—1977, 1982, 1985, or 1995—it took me either 40 or 35 or 32 or 22 years to accumulate my track record of thirty-six volumes, ending with this 2017 instance.

  Roughly one book per year at worst, or one-and-three-quarters at best. In either case, this is hardly a patch on such prodigious past masters as Robert Silverberg or Isaac Asimov or the helmsman behind WordFire Press, Kevin J. Anderson. On the other hand, it’s a much more sizable career than those of many other authors I could name, including some true geniuses such as David Bunch, T. J. Bass and E. R. Eddison.

  I guess what really counts beyond all these statistics is having something to say, saying it well, and enjoying the creation of the stories that contain your dreams and thoughts and hopes and fears. So long as a writer can summon up those qualities and pleasures, the speed at which he or she produces work hardly matters. I hope that these stories illustrate my own possession of such virtues, and provide plenty of entertainment for any reader kind enough to purchase this collection.

  Nonetheless, I want everyone to know that I already have another volume of tales awaiting publication. Number thirty-seven, and beyond!

  —Paul Di Filippo

  One change in my writing habits these days is that more often than not, I only commence a story when one is requested of me. Getting invited to contribute to various anthologies or magazines is a nice perk of having been around for a while. Editors and peers know your name, know your work, and believe—some of them, anyhow—that you might be able to enhance a project. Of course, the writer has to feel simpatico with the nature of the project, but generally there are very few themes or approaches in science fiction, fantasy, or horror that I cannot get behind.

  Judith Dial and Tom Easton conceived of a great gimmick for their Impossible Futures book. If I may quote their invitation:

  “Remember the science and technology you thought we’d have by 2010? Personal jet packs, trans-dimensional travel, workable FTL travel, living clothing, etc. Not just the stuff in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, but the ideas that made the old science fiction so much fun. Some of those ideas came to be—e.g., communicators (as cell phones) and instant visual communication (as the Internet)—but many have not.”

  They suggested some classic tropes, and I chose the “city as enclosed structure or homogenous entity.” But what central principle could I use to organize my polity that had not been used before? What about the aesthetics of the human form?

  City of Beauty, City of Scars

  Our city of Aesthetica takes the form of a tetrahedron, the simplest of all the perfect or Platonic solids, and hence the most noble and beautiful in the eyes of Aglaia. The shining triangular pyramid that is Aesthetica, sited neatly in the middle of a wide green landscaped valley, houses nearly half a million citizens. The three sides of its base measure each twelve miles long—twice six, the perfect number, or teleioi—and its apex looms twelve hundred feet above the base: again, a multiple of the teleioi. The luxurious apartment that occupies the uppermost level—a domicile which, by its tapering shape, is naturally a mi
niature of the whole city—is home to the male and female Prime Allures.

  But because this is my story, and I was born on the lowest level, that’s where I’ll really begin.

  I could not of course bear intelligent witness to the events immediately attendant upon my birth. But my mother, Libet, recounted the story many, many times, during our supervised visits. So often in fact that I, at an impressionable young age, developed false memories of actually seeing her actions unfold, memories as vivid as any I subsequently laid down on my own.

  My birth was of course by Caesarean procedure. All births are conducted so in Aesthethica, for we can not risk the archaic animal process of vaginal delivery inflicting any kind of harm whatsoever on the infant. Each child must emerge from the womb with its Aglaia-given genetic inheritance—all its unique possibilities for developmental expression of postnatal beauty—uncompromised by mere accident.

  My mother was of course sedated for this procedure. But the ineptitude of the technician allowed her to awaken while still recovering in the operating theater. (He was later severely disciplined, being subjected to a third-degree scarification and exiled from Aesthethica, there being no lower level to which he could be demoted.) At the moment when she regained a hazy, pained consciousness, the doctor and all the nurses and assistants were busy fussing over me, checking my vital signs and annotating my aglaiacal indices. This inattention allowed my mother to hastily fumble for a scalpel, which she palmed and concealed under her gown.

  Not long thereafter, in the large, noisy, clean, but impoverished maternity ward where my mother lay abed, recuperating and grimly fondling her concealed weapon, stoking her heart to the task she had determined to perform, a nurse trundled a bassinet down the aisle and delivered me to Libet.

  Under a clattering wall fan, part of Aesthetica’s complex system of ducts and vents, my mother cradled me tenderly, examining all my young parts with an eye for any congenital defects. But there were none.

  My mother addressed the nurse. “He’s perfect, isn’t he?”